


Tales at the Tavern

by Checkerbeard



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-01-27 11:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 35,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12580328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Checkerbeard/pseuds/Checkerbeard
Summary: A good inn provides more than just drinks and beds: it is a place where the brave and foolhardy can find work in exploration and adventure. When news gets around of an interesting new job, it can make for a busy night. The people you'll meet...This is a collection of stories for characters designed for Dungeons and Dragons (fifth edition in particular), written one character per day over the month as part of National Novel Writing Month 2017.





	1. The Landlady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm starting off the month not with a player character, but with a ubiquitous but easily-overlooked non-player character: the barkeep. The facilitator; the one who makes all those meetings at the tavern possible, keeps your characters' mugs filled and lays on a bed for them. There's more to the job of a successful custodian of a fantasy inn than meets the eye.

The sign over the door of the Unarmed Man swung slowly in the breeze, a gentle creak floating gently across the dark town square. The firelight from its windows, scattered in the falling snow, illuminated the blank shield, its slow sway beckoning the stragglers of night in for a drink, travellers on the road to a warm bed.  
  
This was an adventurers’ inn; a true sword-and-board establishment, and some say the very first. Adventurers, she’d always been taught, were the life blood of the Unarmed Man. Eryn’s family had run the Unarmed Man for generations, though some of the regulars were old enough to remember the first custodian – a generation to a Human is but the leaves turning in autumn to an Elf. Handing out beer to someone who remembers your father sitting at your grandmother’s hip was the kind of thing that made this job what it was.  
  
Many would reminisce about how it used to be when she was too young to remember. When the building housed two inns who wouldn’t speak to one another, or when the bar-fights were so regular there was a roped-off fighting ring in the back room and Eryn’s grandfather would take bets. Often, she wondered what they would tell her successors.  
  
Most pubs can be content to keep their beer well and serve it cheaply; an adventuring inn, you need different priorities. To a roving mercenary, a beer is a beer, but a bed has to offer considerably more than their tents and sleeping mats for them to part with their coin. An inn was a place where those in need could find those with the skill to meet them. Your average barkeeper had only to listen to what a customer wanted in their glass, the occasional drunken life story to take with a pinch of salt, usually it was enough to nod knowingly at the right points. Eryn had to keep up with everything.  
  
Newcomers to the town brought rumours and stories from their travels, tales of hidden riches, things that go bump in the night, the Unarmed Man’s bread and butter. But the winter months had been quiet. Local trade was enough to keep the business afloat, and they didn’t mind paying a little more for the beer for a few dark months while the main trade died down, but it didn’t seem quite the same place without the hushed plotting of strangers armed to the teeth, eyes gleaming with the dreams of setting the world to rights and getting rich in the process.  
  
Keep an ear to the ground, your eyes to the roads, a finger in every pie, a foot in every door. A little old lady asking her friend “Oh, have you heard?” could be a week’s takings; Geoffrey at the magic store coming into possession of some unusual amulet could pay for refurbishing the sleeping quarters, but letting a wandering wayfarer get their news from a guard on their way out of town could cost more than one bed for a night.  
  
Eryn stood beside the bar, where a broad wooden pillar stood, covered in tiny nail holes, each the remnant of a story which began at this inn. Here, a wanted poster; there, a bounty on some monster’s head; lost people, found gold, one by one each had found the answer to its call in some shady corner of the room. But now, Eryn took out the last nails. She scattered the torn corners of past papers in the fireplace and watched with a sigh as the last sparks of this year flickered and danced in the smoke. The nights grew longer now, but felt longer still when the crackling of the fire could be heard over the clinking of glasses.  
  
She turned again to the bar. A group of regulars, three Dwarven brothers, the Sladders, perched atop barstools almost as tall as themselves, each well into their third pint. Her shadow danced a slow waltz in the waning firelight as she rounded the bar to fill up the flagon once more.  
  
A cold breeze shook the candle light as the door opened. Three broad faces with white foam in their beards turned as one to see as a hunched, hooded figure, black cape glistening with fresh snow plunged into the dry warmth, closed the door gently behind themselves without a word. They crossed the floor like a shadow and perched on a stool at the far end of the bar.  
  
Eryn grinned to herself. Maybe the year wasn’t quite over yet.  
  
“What would you like, luv?”  
  
“A pint of something dark and a night in the warm, if you please.” A twinkle of candle-light picked out the gold coin now laid on the counter by a gloved hand.  
  
Eryn couldn’t make out any of the newcomer’s face, shaded by their cowl, as she filled up a glass, but she could tell the eyes deep in the darkness were scanning the room from side to side.  
  
“Darkest corner’s over there, opposite side to the fire,” she said with a gesture over their shoulder; “Long table over by the fire seats about twelve or we’ve got a back room;” she pointed over at the door under the stairs. The stranger turned their head toward the Sladders, who returned a small wave. Eryn flashed the stranger a knowing smile. “Don’t worry, they’re regulars here, they know the drill.” The brothers shared a glance and a grin. It would be fair to say that they were the drill.  
  
The newcomer reached inside a leather satchel at their hip and drew from it a rolled-up piece of paper, tied off with a leather thong.  
  
“I’ll get that up on the wall for you,” she said cheerily, picking up from behind the bar the nails which she had not an hour ago taken from the pillar. The figure handed over the paper and she rounded the bar, untying the binding and unrolling it. As she walked past the Sladder brothers, each in turn downed the remains of his beer, wiped the foam from their beards with a sleeve, plonked the empty glass back on the bar and dropped down from his perch, crowding around the pillar as she fixed the poster in place. She stood back to let them read; this was where they worked their magic.  
  
They pored over the sparse details in hushed, rushed tones, slurring embellishments, burying details with intrigue, prodding at this phrase and that with broad fingers, getting their story as straight as they needed, as crooked as they could. With a tale to tell, the youngest, Solker, pulled out a small map of the town and they began tracing the roads with pokes and prods. With a flash, it was back in his pocket.  
  
The eldest, Rikker, slapped a handful of silver on the bar as the middle brother Hedler held open the door. “Same again when we get back,” he chuckled, and the three were gone. Long after the door closed behind them, Eryn could still hear them as they trudged the streets, stage-whispering at the top of their lungs – oh my, a mysterious stranger? On such a night as this, no less! What news, to brave the ice and cold, whom do they seek? What great feats, such a hero would surely be the talk of the nation, nay a legend down the years! How much are they offering? Why, riches beyond your imaginings! Always, just enough information to catch the imagination, just little enough that anyone who heard would need to come to the inn to find out for themselves. A perfect balance, honed through years of putting the town crier to shame.  
  
Eryn slid another log onto the smouldering fire and gave the embers a prod of encouragement – too early for you to sleep yet, she thought: there’s work to do. The room already felt brighter and warmer by the time she turned her back on the fireplace and the flames had yet to take hold. The newcomer had ensconced themselves in the opposite corner, the cultivated darkness, a patch of shadow deeper than its surroundings. The corner had a view of the door and the bar, but was obscured from windows, and no lamps were hung where their light would spoil the gloom.  
  
“If you want any of the candles moving just let me know,” Eryn called into the darkness. The figure raised a hand – a thanks, but a no. She went back behind the bar and began lining up glasses.  
  
By the time the brothers’ raucous pilgrimage brought them back to the Unarmed Man, beards dusted with the still falling snow, their breath white in the night air where the lamplight picked it out in the darkness, every living thing with ears was pricking them up to the news which echoed the streets and alleyways. The mages of the Guild sharing their trade through scrying orbs and sending stones, the last horse and wagon to leave the town for the night, the temple where the righteous pilgrims merely passing through the town came to find their rest – everyone within a mile who had any designs on the adventurer’s life would know within hours. More customers, more beer flowing over the counter, driving down the price of the brothers’ next round. More than once Eryn had offered to pay them, even just in beer, but each time they brushed the offer off: a dwarf earns their silver through hard graft. Gold doesn’t grow on trees, they said: you dig for it.  
  
Eryn slid three pint pots across the bar before they’d even climbed up into their eyries and they clattered them together with a triumphant chuckle, and raised a wordless toast to the shadow in the corner, the growing firelight bristling eagerly over the walls around them; flickering reflections fidgeted in the windows as though peering out, the warmth sweeping aside the chill air which followed the Sladders from the door to their seats, ready to welcome whoever came to the door.  
  
Adventurers are the life-blood of the Unarmed Man, but the locals are the beating heart of it.


	2. Partners in Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While yesterday had no player characters, to make up for it today's chapter has two. I've always liked the idea of characters who knew one another before the campaign, but it's not something I've seen done much.  
> These two are rogues, one assassin and one thief, but really I wanted to look at how an established couple would play off one another.

The Unarmed Man begin to fill with locals first; some just came to eavesdrop, most just for a beer while there was a chance of it being a few coppers cheaper. But stories can inspire, and it wasn’t unheard of for a regular to take to the road with some merry band of adventurers, bright-eyed and full of dreams – especially when one of them came back, showing off their scars, their exotic souvenirs, now the storyteller where once they listened in awe.  
  
They knew better than to crowd the dark corner, or take the seats around the fire; there were unmarked lines and unspoken rules – don’t stop a traveller spending their gold.  
  
The door opened once more, and all eyes were on the two hooded figures who entered; they threw back their hoods, revealing Elven faces, pink from the cold, one with black hair cropped short, the other with his tied back in a blond ponytail, both in simple, dark leather armour under woollen cloaks. As they dusted the snow from themselves, a Halfling by the bar used the moment’s distraction of everyone’s curiosity to slide the coin purse from Rikker’s pocket and into his own, before taking his glass from the bar and slinking off to sit nearer the fire.  
  
As he passed between the two Elves, the long-haired one stepped sideways ever so slightly, bumping into the Halfling.  
  
“Terribly sorry,” he smiled politely, placing a hand on his shoulder, as his companion palmed the purse, its drawstring still poking from the Halfling’s pocket. “Eyes haven’t adjusted to the light yet.” The two perched themselves on stools at the bar by the Sladder brothers, and the short-haired one slipped the purse back into Rikker’s pocket, without anyone but the Halfling ever knowing it was missing.  
  
“Good evening, Eryn,” he called over the bar. “Have you got a barrel of the blonde on?”  
  
She paused for a second, then her eyes widened. “Riarden?”  
  
He waved a hand above his head with a grin. “It’s the hair, isn’t it? Bit different without it.”  
  
“I’ll say,” she laughed, putting two empty glasses on the bar in-front of them. His companion was still looking around the room with an air of vague familiarity. “You used to be in here every week, I thought you’d died or something!”  
  
“No, a few close calls but just travelling, really,” he said.  
  
“Keeping yourself out of trouble?”  
  
“Why would I want to do that?”  
  
Eryn laughed. “How long have you been back around here, then?”  
  
“Just got in today.” He fished some coins out of his pocket and dropped them into Eryn’s hand and she sidled along the bar to fetch the flagon and Riarden looked around the thronging crowd. “Wasn’t expecting you to have this much business at this time of year. A year ago today when Heian and I were here it was pretty quiet,” he added, nodding his head toward the other Elf as Eryn filled up their glasses.  
  
“Hold on,” he said slowly, his brow furrowing as he turned to face Riarden. “A year ago today?”  
  
“Yep,” he smiled. “Happy anniversary.”  
  
“Oh you can’t call it that,” Heian said exasperatedly.  
  
“Why not? That was our first date.”  
  
“It wasn’t a date!”  
  
“You arranged to meet me here in the evening…”  
  
“I was sent here to kill you.”  
  
“You bought me a drink.”  
  
“There was poison in it!”  
  
“Then to round off a lovely evening, you saved my life.”  
  
“From the poison,” Heian rasped, his face buried in his palm.  
  
“Not just the poison,” Riarden said, putting an arm around Heian’s shoulders. “You saved me from being the kind of person people send assassins like you after.”  
  
“Oh come off it.” Heian tried not to smile. Riarden didn’t try.  
  
“You’re blushing.”  
  
“It’s just warm in here,” he said quickly, looking away towards the fire. The Halfling was trying to turn his pockets inside out without arousing suspicion from those around him. By the looks he was getting, he appeared to be failing.  
  
“Reckon he’s going to figure out what happened at any point?” Heian asked quietly.  
  
Riarden shrugged. “What if he does? What’s he going to do, cry thief?”  
  
“I think I want him to try,” Heian smiled. The Halfling looked up and noticed the glares he was getting around him, and threw a look of realisation at the bar. Heian and Riarden smiled and waved at him. The Halfling threw on a strained smile of innocence and waved back.  
  
“The best bit about being the good guy is there’s nothing they can do about it,” Riarden chuckled, turning back to his drink.  
  
“Being the good guy who just pickpocketed a wallet.”  
  
Riarden shrugged exaggeratedly. “He stole it first.”  
  
“You still stole it.”  
  
“You helped.”  
  
Heian sighed. “I don’t think you’ll ever be quite right, you know that?”  
  
“You’re probably not wrong.” He smiled and drank the remainder of his beer. “But I’d still say stealing something back isn’t stealing. Anyway, the money ended up back where it belongs, and that’s not something I used to be able to say.”  
  
Heian glared at him silently. Riarden looked down at his beer and blushed, then pulled a gold coin out of his pocket, dropping it down by his side and gave Rikker a nudge.  
  
“Excuse me?” The dwarf looked around at him blearily. “I think you’ve dropped that,” he said, pointing at the coin glinting on the floor.  
  
“Oh, thanks,” Rikker mumbled, slipping down to pick up the stray coin. He put it up on the bar and waved Eryn over, his eyes just visible over the bar.  
  
“Another of the same please and one for this lad,” he said, his voice somewhat muffled by the bar. He gave Riarden a pat on the back. “Very honest of you,” he said as he clambered back onto his seat. Eryn slid another glass over for each of them. Riarden gave Heian an innocent shrug; Heian rolled his eyes but couldn’t help but smile.  
  
“Well technically I did him a favour,” Riarden whispered.  
  
Heian smiled. “Not quite right,” he sighed, “But you’ll do.”  
  
Behind them, they saw the Halfling making a hurried exit and trying not to look in their direction. Riarden gestured to the table he’d just vacated and led Heian over to it, where they threw their cloaks over the backs of their chairs to dry.  
  
“So about that night,” Riarden said quietly.  
  
Heian scowled over his beer. “Which part of it?”  
  
“The first part,” Riarden smiled. “You never told me who wanted me dead.”  
  
“Ah.” He put the glass down and ran a finger around the rim sheepishly. “Well… You know Dunbarr?”  
  
Riarden narrowed his eyes. “The place or the jumped-up noble?”  
  
“The latter.”  
  
“The one with the bandits in his pocket.”  
  
“Yeah, that one.”  
  
“The guy running a protection racket across a whole city.”  
  
“I know, I know…”  
  
“The one we…” Riarden glanced from side to side and raised an eyebrow.  
  
“Two months ago, yeah, that one.”  
  
Riarden leaned in close. “You took a job from that scumbag? I thought you were always – you know. Scrupulous. Honourable, civil, all that stuff.”  
  
“I didn’t know!” Heian pleaded, throwing up his hands. “As far as I knew he was just some rich guy you’d pissed off to the point where he wanted you dead. All I knew was that you were behind the temple robberies and he offered the bounty.”  
  
“Oh, so he was a religious scumbag,” Riarden sneered. “Do well by the Gods but your fellow mortals are fair game?”  
  
“Not exactly.” Heian leant across the table. “That temple of Heironeous you hit, a few months before?”  
  
Riarden pouted. “Was just a couple of copper statuettes.”  
  
“Statues,” Heian corrected. “They were life-sized statues.” Riarden smirked. “Anyway, it turned out not to be a real temple, just a front for laundering money from the bandit gangs.”  
  
Riarden spat something bitter in Elvish, to which Heian shrugged in agreement. They both stared silently into their drinks for a moment.  
  
“So that poison you slipped him,” Riarden said slowly.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Was it the same as you gave me?”  
  
Heian didn’t look up from his beer. “Yeah.”  
  
Riarden took a sip. “So, theoretically…”  
  
Heian looked up. “What are you thinking?”  
  
“Theoretically,” he continued, slowly, “You could have saved him too.”  
  
Heian shook his head. “No. I didn’t prepare an antidote.”  
  
They looked into the fire; it was somewhere to look that wasn’t their drinks, their feet, or each other. It crackled almost musically, but around it hung an uncomfortable silence.  
  
“But you did a year ago.”  
  
Heian cracked a small smile. “Yep.”  
  
Riarden looked back at him. “Why?”  
  
“I’m not sure,” he said quietly. “Maybe I already knew something wasn’t right with Dunbarr? Maybe his story didn’t quite fit, maybe it just didn’t fit him.”  
  
“Maybe,” Riarden said, pressing slightly with his tone.  
  
“Maybe the antidote was for me, in case you got suspicious and switched our drinks.”  
  
“Oh that’s definitely something I can imagine you falling for,” Riarden laughed.  
  
“Or maybe,” Heian said, reddening slightly, “After following you around for a week so I knew to meet you here, I just decided I liked following you around and it’d be a shame to finish.”  
  
Riarden grinned. “And look where that’s led you.”  
  
“Yeah,” Heian said, looking over at the bar. “Say, the landlady – she doesn’t mind my being here, does she?”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Well when all’s said and done, last time I came here I tried to murder a regular.”  
  
“You should’ve come here when her grandfather ran the place,” Riarden laughed.  
  
Heian emptied his glass. “Think I’m going to get another pint,” he said, reaching into his pocket.”  
  
“I’ll get this one.”  
  
“No, it’s fine,” Heian said, waving him away and pulling out a small coin purse Riarden didn’t recognise. “This one’s on the Halfling from earlier.”  
  
Riarden broke into a broad grin. “You’re not quite right, you know that?”  
  
“You’re probably not wrong.” He reached out and put his hand on Riarden’s. “Happy anniversary.”


	3. Field Studies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Today's character's a Wizard subclass that didn't make the core rulebook, and that makes me sad (in a different way): the Lore Wizard.  
>   
> I feel like the Lore Wizard is what Wizards should have been all along. The core subclasses lack any definition - just generic spellcasters, without any drive or niche. But the Lore Wizard appealed to me - and I realised why: they're complete nerds.  
>   
> Most Wizards seem hard to root, I can't picture them not adventuring easily, but Lore Wizards are so easy to see bustling about a lab going "I wonder what happens if I do this" - and their "gimmick" is to be able to change a spell's function on the fly, in a way that feels a lot like programming: re-use the same methods, just tweak some variables. I instantly got a picture not of the typical wizened, grey-haired mage, but of a Ph.D student, revelling in the opportunity to escape the bureaucracy of education and just do their damn research.

A face peered in through the window inquisitively, a hand-wave clearing the condensation which clouded the inside of the pane. A moment later, the face appeared at the door, and in scurried a Tiefling. Her shoulder-length, dark purple hair was pushed back out of her face behind her ram-like horns; she was dressed in simple, grey robes, her arms filled with large, thick, leather-bound books with brass filigree. She closed the door behind her with a fur-booted hoof and stomped the snow off.  
  
She ignored the sideways glances cast her way as she approached the bar; something a Tiefling learns to put up with, though the Unarmed Man had had more than its fair share of unusual types walk through those doors. She put the books down on the bar and adjusted the stack, twisting books this way and that until she was satisfied with how they were aligned. Previously hidden behind the books was a silver badge, which she adjusted slightly and gave a proud polish before leaning over the bar to wave Eryn over shyly.  
  
“Hi erm, oh,” she started, realising she hadn’t actually thought of what she was going to ask for. “Can I have a… just a glass of water, please?”  
  
Eryn raised an eyebrow. “Just water? You’re sure?”  
  
“Oh… well what is there?”  
  
“We’ve got two beers open, a blonde and a Dwarven dark wheat beer, we’ve got red wine and mead, cider, anything strike you?”  
  
“Just water, please.”  
  
“Just water,” Eryn repeated, opening the door behind the bar to fill up a mug from the spring-water in the brewery.  
  
She came back with the mug filled and the Tiefling began fishing in her pockets.  
  
“It’s just water, dear, I won’t charge you for that, it literally falls out of the sky.”  
  
“Oh, yes,” she stammered, standing up and picking her stack of books back up again. “Thank you!” She set off for a table.  
  
Eryn called after her. “Excuse me luv?” she whirled around. “You forgot your water.”  
  
She scurried back, blushing deep purple, and hooked a finger through the handle of the mug, and walked gingerly back the way she’d came.  
  
She placed the mug down gently on the cleanest table she could find, then put the stack of books down next to it, once again tweaking the pile so it lined up properly. She took two books off the top of the pile; the first was decorated with brass inlay and intricately cut leather, and she opened it to where a leather strip marked her page; the other, which had sat atop the pile, was plain and far smaller, tied closed with a string. She thumbed her way to a page half-filled with diagrams and spidery writing. As she took out her quill, she realised someone had sat down opposite her.  
  
A man with a short beard and a mug of beer had pulled up a chair to the other side of her table.  
  
“Do you mind if I sit here?”  
  
“Um,” she gestured vaguely, an indication that she didn’t mind either way. He smiled and sat down, slightly side-on to the table, leaning in a little.  
  
“I’m Grendeen, by the way.”  
  
“Diana,” she responded shortly.  
  
“Is that badge from the Mages’ College?” he asked, indicating the silver glinting in the lamplight.  
  
“Yes,” she said with a smile; “I’m a faculty member. Er, sort of. Well,” she stammered, “Sort of still a student but doing my own research.”  
  
“Oh really? What’s your research?”  
  
She beamed, pulling another book from the middle of the stack. “Well,” she began, “I’m looking at bridging the current divide between cyclochistic and omiliochistic spell structures.”  
  
Grendeen stared at her blankly. “Psychocystic?”  
  
“Cyclochistic,” she repeated, placing the book down in-front of him.  
  
On the open page before him was an intricate magical circle, rings within rings, arcs, lines and bars passing in and out of one another, inscribed with characters which may not even have been the same alphabet; it almost seemed to shift before his eyes.  
  
“Cyclochistic magic is cast using a magic circle – it’s not a great name, they’re not all circular. My favourite one’s actually triangular,” she added with a grin; “Once you’ve got the circle all laid out then it’s really quick and easy to use, just a simple trigger and the circle does all the work.” She pulled the book back to herself, closed it and put it back in the pile. “That circle, if I were to try to cast that without a circle, I’d be here for hours!”  
  
Grendeen was beginning to think he might know that feeling soon. He leaned back to get his eyes off the circle; it made him feel uneasy, like it was looking at him.  
  
“Problem with them is that they take a long time to draw out, you need your reagents up-front before you can even think about starting, and they’re very set in stone – they only do one thing, you want to make any changes to that and you need a new circle.  
  
“But on the other hand, you’ve got omiliochistic spells – there more like what you think of when you hear the word ‘spell’, you say the right words, make the right hand gestures, magic.” She twiddled her fingers and produced a glowing speck between her hands. “But the more you want to do with it the more gestures you need to chain together, the more words you need to remember, you need the right word order – you don’t want to confuse the range of a spell with its area of effect,” she chuckled.  
  
“Sure,” Grendeen cut in, trying to drag the subject a little more down to earth and moving to stand up; “Can I get you a drink?”  
  
“Oh, I’m fine thanks,” she said, tapping her cup of water; Grendeen sank back into his seat. “Anyway, what I’m trying to do is make cyclochistic spells with omiliochistic triggers.”  
  
“Uh?” Grendeen could feel his jaw sagging. Apparently whatever noise he just made in lieu of the question “What are you talking about?” sounded like it meant “How fascinating! Please elaborate”, as Diana was now flicking through the small book she had already opened. She slid it over and pointed at the diagram drawn on the page; to Grendeen’s eyes, it looked virtually identical to the circle she had shown him moments ago, if it were drawn in a hurry by someone who hadn’t slept in a week. It also gave him the feeling if he looked any longer, nor would he.  
  
“So what I’ve done here is I’ve set multiple trigger phrases in one circle,” she rattled. “By incorporating multiple independent methods into a single circle, which can be called without one another but still invoke the whole complexity inherent in it, what I hope to have achieved is making the spell modular.”  
  
“Modular,” Grendeen repeated with a vague nod.  
  
“Yes,” she continued; “So this is based on a circle which casts a fireball, but I’ve added triggers into it for other elements, so it should – I hope – for example, be able to do the same thing with ice.”  
  
“Snowball.”  
  
“A snowball which explodes,” Diana corrected him. “But that’s quite a simple spell to use a circle for.”  
  
“Simple,” Grendeen slurred.  
  
“I mean there are spells that make it literally rain fire, the amount of variables you need to account for in that – I’ve seen the omiliochistic incantation for it, it’s ridiculous, but being able to do something like that and decide on the fly oh, I don’t know, make it rain…”  
  
“Snow?”  
  
“Yeah, that was a bad example,” Diana sighed. “Anyway, there’s only so much you can do in a research lab when you’re working on the kind of magic that there aren’t books about yet.”  
  
“But…” Grendeen pointed at the stack of books she’d brought with her.  
  
“Oh there are useful books,” she said, hugging the stack closer; “But only really for reference, you know? And there’s more to them than there really needs to be – wizards seem to have a tendency of getting bogged down in the details.”  
  
“Do they now,” Grendeen said, raising an eyebrow. Diana seemed not to notice, and carried on without stopping for breath.  
  
“So when I heard there’d be a group leaving on some adventure or other, it sounded the perfect opportunity,” she said with a bounce and a grin. “Finally actually get to field-test this, see if I’m really onto something.”  
  
“Really on something,” Grendeen mumbled and slurped his beer.  
  
“I mean imagine if I am! This could be the biggest thing since psionics!”  
  
“That’s the one with the circles, right?”  
  
“No,” Diana snapped with a scowl; “That’s cyclochiscics. Psionics is mystical magic.”  
  
“But haven’t mystics been around… forever?”  
  
“Knowing something exists and knowing why it works are very different things,” she said slowly, still frowning at him. “That’s why we called them mystic.”  
  
Grendeen shrugged and nodded; it seemed a fair point. Or at least, it was the first sentence she’d said in a while in which he understood every word. Diana took another sip of her water and began scribbling in her book again.  
  
“So this job,” Grendeen tried. “Sounds interesting; get to see the world.”  
  
“Oh yeah,” Diana said cheerily, still scratching away; as she drew shapes onto the page, the letters etched themselves in the gap in-between. “The college library is missing loads on things like ancient Dwarven runic magic, crystal magic, primal magic, all sorts – rune magic’s one I’m particularly hopeful for, I don’t know if anyone’s even tried putting a runic spell in a magic circle.” She looked up again, her eyes suddenly wide with excitement, dropping the quill to wave her hands enthusiastically. “Do you know that there are reportedly single runes – just one character, no reagents, no prep time, just one character for a whole spell!”  
  
Grendeen was taken aback by the sudden burst of energy, spilling his beer down his beard.  
  
“What kind of spell?”  
  
Diana grinned, almost giggled. “I have no idea.”


	4. Little Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a character I've actually already played, although in Pathfinder, where the gnomes are somewhat more colourful and eccentric, but not to a point where he doesn't seem to fit in another setting. I wanted to try out a cleric, something I hadn't done before, and came across the fact that a cleric does not need to be bound to a deity: if not, they are simply treated as bound to a neutral deity. And I began thinking.  
>   
> Is atheism a thing in fantasy settings?  
>   
> Please don't read too much into my own beliefs or philosophies here. This character is the epitome of an exercise in separating what you know as a player and what your character knows: by having a character articulate, logical and absolutely, unequivocally wrong.

The door swung once more to reveal a diminutive figure, a gnome, with a spiralling red goatee hanging down from his pointed chin, the top of his brightly coloured turban not even high enough to reach the window, the trailing fabric blending into his equally colourful robes. Over his shoulder, he carried a battered metal pail – whether it was a particularly large pail or simply that the way he carried it exaggerated his own smallness was hard to tell, but it would be no stretch of the imagination to picture him inside it.  
  
He closed the door behind himself and rubbed his hands together for warmth, then glanced down at the bucket, opened the door once more and tipped out the snow which had half-filled it.  
  
“Thought that felt heavy,” he said to himself, picking his purse out of the mound of snow and shaking it clean. He closed the door once more, made his way over to the bar with a look around at the other patrons, and placed the bucket upside-down next to a barstool and used it as a step to get himself up to bar level.  
  
“Good evening, ma’am,” he called over, a gentle sing-song to his voice.  
  
“Evenin’; what do you fancy?”  
  
He thought for a moment. “Something I’ll regret in the morning.” He paused. “But not until the morning. Preferably.”  
  
Eryn raised an eyebrow at him and gave a slight smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”  
  
The rainbow of his turban and robes drew Solker’s eye. He looked him up and down, though mostly down – an unusual thing for a Dwarf.  
  
“And who might you be?”  
  
“Dalkinic,” he chirped cheerfully, extending a diminutive hand; Solker gripped it between thumb and forefinger and shook it. “To whom do I owe the pleasure?”  
  
“Solker Sladder,” the Dwarf responded. “What’s the bucket for?”  
  
“All sorts,” Dalkinic said with a grin. “Like a waterproof satchel. In fact, if you don’t mind the squeeze and you’ve a broom-head or the like, you can cover quite a bit of country by rowing it.”  
  
“Give over!”  
  
“I was a hundred miles upstream just this time last week.”  
  
Solker laughed and patted him on the back, nearly knocking him off his stool.  
  
“So, I take it by all the colours you’re a bard, then? Some sort of jester?”  
  
“Actually I’m a cleric – of sorts,” he replied with a smirk. Eryn plonked a tankard on the bar in-front of him and he thanked her with a wordless gesture and a handful of coins. He took a sip and let out an impressed whistle.  
  
“How do you mean ‘of sorts’? What god do you follow?”  
  
He put the tankard back down again. “See, that’s just the thing. What is… a god?”  
  
Solker blinked. “Erm… Deity. Higher power. Immortal being. You know, a god.”  
  
“Yes, but how do you know that?”  
  
“Well everyone knows that.”  
  
“Yes but from whom?”  
  
Solker narrowed his eyes at Dalkinic. “I don’t follow.”  
  
“What I’m asking is this: how do you know that the gods exist?”  
  
Solker let out a deep belly laugh; a few heads turned in their direction.  
  
“It seems a sensible enough question to me. How do you know that gods are real?”  
  
The inn fell silent. Suddenly all eyes were on Dalkinic. He grinned and hopped down off the bar-stool, tankard in hand; he shunted the bucket into the middle of the floor and stood on it, where everyone could see at least his head.  
  
“Can anyone really say they have seen proof of the gods?”  
  
A voice piped up from the corner by the window. “When I fell of my horse just a week ago, I broke my ribs and punctured my lung – a cleric from the temple of Pelor healed my wounds.”  
  
“Exactly, you’ve already said my point,” Dalkinic said sharply, “A cleric healed your wounds. Not Pelor, not a god, not an angel, just someone at a temple. Someone saw to your injuries, they mended your bones, they sealed your lung, without Pelor peering over his shoulder or pointing at what needed doing.”  
  
“But he did it by Pelor’s blessing!”  
  
Dalkinic held up his tankard and scanned the room. “Is there anyone here injured? Cuts and bruises, limps and sprains – anyone?” He saw a woman shift uneasily. “Yes ma’am, what’s the trouble?”  
  
“Well – on my way out tonight the wind caught the door as I was leaving, wrenched my wrist,” she said, indicating her arm. “Can’t hold a glass in it.”  
  
“Not to worry, can you come here please?” Dalkinic beckoned her over. He took her hand and lifted her sleeve; her wrist was swollen and discoloured.  
  
“This might feel a little strange,” he said gently.  
  
The swollen area began to glow with a warm, pale light; when it faded, there was no sign of anything wrong with the wrist.  
  
“Now, can you hold this in it?” He handed her his tankard; she looked at her hand in mild surprise for a second before handing it back and walking awkwardly back to her own drink with an apologetic shrug at the others watching.  
  
“Now I didn’t call on Pelor,” Dalkinic said; “I didn’t call on any god, nor any spirit nor something which sings from up in its clouds nor which goes bump in the night. I didn’t pray to any higher power or any immortal entity for the right nor the ability to do that; what you have just seen is no miracle, no great show of the power of some being the temples tell you to worship – it was mortal work.”  
  
“But people have seen them,” chimed a voice from the back. “People have spoken with Bahamut, in the flesh.”  
  
“People you know? Or people you’ve heard of? Has anyone here actually seen a god, maybe you know someone who has?” There was another uncomfortable silence. “Many a temple custodian, their paladins and clerics, will tell you they have, that their god has appeared before them, maybe in a dream – but why have any faith in dreams?” he laughed. “Why have faith in what you see when asleep, when even while you are awake there are people, there are dragons even, who can change their shape at will? They say that Bahamut appears as a dragon, or sometimes he appears as an old man, or maybe he just is? Not a god humbly coming before us in flawed mortal form but a flawed mortal coming before us with claims to be a god? Is it not more reasonable to assume that the divine visitation you hear about was actually just a visit? If I were to tell you I had seen a metallic dragon suddenly take the form of a man, why I’ve just described exactly what one would expect of a mercury dragon – a creature well-known for its ability to change its shape, and its affinity for tricking people by doing so.”  
  
Diana raised her hand sceptically.  
  
“I’m literally part Devil,” she said, pointing at a horn.  
  
“And I’m literally all Gnome,” he said in retort, framing himself with a wave. “Gnome, Devil, Elf, Orc, that we are what we are is not a sign that anything else is what it is. A Devil is not a god, however much stock Devils claim in their gods, as Elves in the Seladrine, Humans in their pantheon – so many cooks for one broth, and the stories don’t even line up,” he laughed. “There are gods who may be other gods by other names, or may not, or may have been – surely to be sure they exist at all, we first need to know what it is we’re asking exists? And on whose authority do we have these names? You all know the name of Lolth?” There was a small gasp. “That will be a yes, then. You know the story of her?”  
  
“She was cast out of the Elven pantheon by the Seladrine,” Diana chimed in, hand raised like a schoolchild. “After she led a failed rebellion against Corellon.”  
  
“And when was this?”  
  
“In the Dawn Age.”  
  
Dalkinic grinned triumphantly. “When there was no-one around to write it down?” Diana opened and shut her mouth a few times. “Yet somehow, we know that story today. Now why would the gods care if we knew that an evil being was once not, thirty millenia ago? It makes no difference to them now, does it – does it help us to understand her? No – but does it help us understand ourselves?” He stood in silence for a second, dozens of pairs of eyes regarding him blankly. “That’s what legends are for. The good can fall to evil, the evil can rise to good. The mighty can be broken by the meek, these are not stories of gods, they are stories of people. Stories which have been blown up through the years until we are building temples and waging battles in the names of fallen heroes.”  
  
He took another swig from his tankard. “The next time someone heals another person’s wounds, or gives gold to those in need of it, or raises their shield in the name of some god or other, ask why. Ask yourself, ask them, why in that name. Why not in the name of the wounded; why not in the name of the needy; why not in the name of the defenceless; why not, at the very least, in their own name? You have seen me heal wounds before you not in the name of a supreme being or eternal grace, but in the name of simple common sense. And if there is power in that, there is power in all of us.”  
  
He hopped down from his bucket and basked in the stunned silence of a room full of people staring at him dumbfounded. From outside, a distant clap of thunder rolled across the skies, like a hundred great hands striking a hundred faces.  
  
Slinging the bucket over his shoulder, he strolled triumphantly over to an armchair near the fire. The cat curled up by the fire stirred as he sat by it, regarded him irritably, and buried its head behind its tail again.  
  
Solker turned back to the bar and emptied his glass.  
  
“One of whatever he’s having, please.”


	5. A Familiar Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a meme of a bear sitting at a picnic table, with the caption "What do you mean I have to come out of wild form eventually?" And it got me wondering... what if you didn't? This is actually a pretty possible character (above level 2, druids can't use Wild Shape before that - these are all characters you can play at level 5), but just because you can...  
>   
> No, you should. You know you should.

The cat by the fire uncurled itself, stretched itself into a crescent, rolled over away from the fire and sat up, washing its paws lazily. Dalkinic reached town to pet it but it swatted his hand away and glared at him.  
  
It stood up, weaving between chair legs, tables, the regulars stepping out of its way instinctively without having to look. In one leap it crested the bar, sitting with its tail hanging over the edge and curling back and forth, and meowed at Eryn.  
  
“One silver on your tab?” The cat blinked slowly and Eryn disappeared into the back room.  
  
Diana put down her quill and stared in awe; Eryn emerged with a small plate, bearing a fish, its head and tail flopping off either side of the plate. The cat manoeuvred it toward the edge of the plate with a few bats of its paw, lifted it in its mouth and hopped down from the bar, to the stool, to the floor and made its way back toward the fireplace.  
  
Diana leaned over to Grendeen as the cat came back past their table. “Are we not going to talk about the fact a cat just ordered dinner?”  
  
“Oh, that’s Jennifer – she’s not actually a cat,” Grendeen started, but was cut short as the cat in question jumped up onto the table, the fish still hanging out of her mouth, and looked him dead in the eyes.  
  
“What?”  
  
Without breaking eye contact, she pushed his glass a little towards the edge of the table.  
  
“OK, fine, you’re a cat,” he surrendered, picking up the glass out of her reach. Seemingly satisfied, she dropped back down to the floor and went on her way back to the fire. “What I mean is she didn’t used to be a cat,” he clarified.  
  
“What did she used to be?”  
  
“She was a regular girl when she first came here.”  
  
“Oh dear,” Diana whispered; the cat dropped the fish on the hearthstone and began tucking in. “What happened to her?”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“When did she get…” Diana gestured vaguely. “You know, how did she get turned into a cat?”  
  
“Oh, she still turns back once a month or so.”  
  
Diana gasped. “Oh, is it something like lycanthropy? Is she like a reverse werewolf now? Except a cat?”  
  
“No, she turns back to settle her bar tab.” Diana scowled in bemusement. “Well as she is she doesn’t really have pockets, you see.”  
  
“Yes, I understand that, but _why is she a cat?_ ”  
  
“Wouldn’t you be if you could?” He shrugged. “Seems like a pretty sensible life choice to me.”  
  
“So this is voluntary?”  
  
“Well yeah,” Grendeen laughed. “Spent a lot of time studying Druidry to pull it off.” This study had, at the moment, led Jennifer to be juggling a fish head back and forth across the carpet in front of the fire.  
  
“I’ve never seen a druid who could hold an animal shape for so long without – “  
  
“Sleeping?” Grendeen grinned. “Cats are always sleeping. That’s her trick.”  
  
A few tables over, the woman who had her wrist healed during Dalkinic’s impromptu sermon began to stand up to get the glass she could now hold again refilled; As she turned her knees out from under the table, Jennifer leapt into her lap, kneaded her skirt and curled up. The woman sighed and passed her glass over to another woman at the table, who took it to the bar for her.  
  
“She really has embraced the cat way of life, hasn’t she?” Diana said with a smile.  
  
“Oh, she pretty much did that before she was a cat,” Grendeen chuckled and took a sip of beer. “She can just get away with it now; people just don’t mind it if you’re furry.” Jennifer opened an eye and glared at him. “Could’ve said that better.” The woman whose lap she was in began idly stroking her.  
  
“Isn’t that a bit… You know,” Diana curled her lip uneasily. “That’s still a person she’s stroking.”  
  
Grendeen shrugged. “Or it’s a cat who turns into a person once a month to pay for fish.”  
  
“But how does she pay?” Diana mused – of all the absurdities, she was disappointed in herself that this hadn’t struck her earlier.  
  
“Eryn settles the bill every couple of months and works out what’s owed, pretty easily really.”  
  
“No, I mean how does she have money? I couldn’t buy a fish dinner every meal every day!”  
  
“Oh, I see. She does what cats do best.”  
  
“People pay her to be petted?”  
  
“No, you’re thinking of – ” Jennifer glared at him, ears turned back, and he stopped himself. “No, she catches mice, rats, that sort of thing. Not just in this inn, she’s sort of the town’s pest control.”  
  
“That doesn’t sound very in keeping with the druidic way of life, killing animals for payment from people,” Diana mused. Now she got the stare.  
  
“Well if it weren’t for people there wouldn’t be so many rats here. And she doesn’t kill all of them, just enough that they’re not such pests.”  
  
“Just enough to keep a balance?” Diana smiled.  
  
“Well if she killed them all she’d be out of business.” The smile dropped. “Which I suppose is a balance of sorts.”  
  
Jennifer got bored of the lap she was sat in just as the woman’s drink arrived, sitting up, stretching her claws and nearly knocking the drink from her hand, as the woman’s friend had returned not just with the drink but with food for herself. Jennifer pricked up her ears, tail lifted with a question mark curl at its tip and hopped onto the table, knocking off the spoon and peering over the lip of the bowl at the soup the woman had brought. She held it over her head, out of paws’ reach.  
  
“Oh give over, it’s vegetables anyway.” Jennifer gave her an unimpressed look, well aware that the soup of the day was fish, but hopped down off the table anyway. She paused momentarily to bat the spoon with her paw but it skittered out of her reach and she lost interest.  
  
“So how long has she… well, been a cat?”  
  
Grendeen looked up at the ceiling, squinting in recollection. “A few years now. She ran away from her home somewhere out in the country when she was just a kid and pretty much lived here ever since.”  
  
“Oh that’s awful – what happened?”  
  
“Not so much something that happened – she says her family are farmers, raise pigs and beef cows and that never quite sat right with her. Says she spent more time with the farm cats than she did with her own parents. So she just skipped town one day with a bunch of adventurers and when they stopped off here, she just stayed and this was her home from then on. Supposedly lived in the sleeping quarters but really spent most nights in a chair by the fireplace after Eryn closed the place up for the night; worked as a barmaid for a couple of years – not as a cat, just in case you’re wondering – then disappeared again.”  
  
“Where to?” Diana conjured a fleck of light on her fingertip and flung it onto the ground in front of Jennifer. Her eyes widened and she crouched down, tail flicking from side to side.  
  
“She never said,” he said with a shrug, as Diana drove the spark around the floor, Jennifer chasing it under tables and over chairs in a thunder of paws. “She just came back a while later with this wild look about her and said something along the lines of ‘So I went to study with a druid and just so you know I’m a cat now, I hope you don’t mind’, then poof, she was… well, a cat. Curled up by the fire and pretty much been there ever since.”  
  
As the spark of light Diana was steering around the floor stalled by the fireplace, Jennifer pounced and caught it, pinning it to the floor, and peered at it triumphantly, suddenly realising there was nothing there to pin down but a point of light. She pointed her ear at Diana first, then turned to look at her, then back to the spark flickering on the floor, then Diana again. Diana put her hand down sheepishly and the spark winked out of existence.  
  
“Sorry – is that patronising?”  
  
“Probably,” Grendeen laughed, “But most magic types do it anyway and she still chases it every time. She’s probably more annoyed that you stopped.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Jennifer washed some dignity back into her paws, lifted her tail, trotted over to the door and stared expectantly at the handle.  
  
“She’s not leaving on my account, is she?”  
  
“No, but she’s got to earn her keep somehow,” Grendeen said, and drank the last of his beer. “She goes out at night, people wake up in the morning to find a line of dead mice and rats on their doorstep.”  
  
Diana screwed up her face. “That’s disgusting…”  
  
He shrugged again. “Then, at the end of the month, she comes around to collect they pay her per tail.”  
  
She pawed at the door handle and sat back down again, turning to meow at the room in general.  
  
“All right, then,” Grendeen sighed, standing up. He took his glass to the bar and walked to the door. He pulled his cloak from the stand by the door and pulled it on, pulling gloves out of the pockets, and opened the door. The breeze whirled around the room, a chill sending shivers down the spines of people too close to the door. The people closest to the draft turned to Jennifer, looking expectantly at her, as she poked her head around the door, and sat in the doorway in front of Grendeen’s feet.  
  
“Really?” he sighed exasperatedly. Jennifer looked up at him and meowed again. He opened the door wider to walk around her and she trotted off into the snow.  
  
“All right, fine,” Grendeen said as he pulled the door shut behind him. “You are definitely a cat.”


	6. The Seated Knight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The idea for this character I think came about while watching the 2016 Paralympics. I don't particularly watch the Olympics but the Paralympics are another league to me: the Olympics are impressive, but the Paralympics are just incredible; the word "inspiring" gets said probably too much around disabled athletes, to the point of evoking the notion of "inspiration porn", but it's true, and I was inspired to think of this character. But the concept of the character really gained traction when he became an NPC in my game, where his backstory here really came about.  
>   
> This strays outside core rules a little, as there are two Fighter subclasses which lend themselves to this character (Knight and Cavalier), but both are in Unearthed Arcana, which is playtest material. I think at least one will be properly released in Xanathar's Guide to Everything this month.

Grendeen rubbed his gloved hands together and blew a puff of warm air into them, and shoved them under his arms to keep in the warmth, as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark away from the lamps and firelight of the inn.  
  
“Excuse me, sir?” Grendeen looked around for the source of the voice; a white horse was approaching along the road, its rider’s silver armour glimmering in the moonlight.  
  
Grendeen held up a hand to block the light from the window so he could see the rider more clearly. “Who goes there?”  
  
“My name is Erlos,” the rider called back. “To whom am I speaking?”  
  
“Grendeen,” he responded. “Can I help you?”  
  
“A rider on the road told me I may be of assistance here.”  
  
“You’ve come to the right place,” Grendeen said, pointing over his shoulder at the door to the inn. “The person you need to see’s inside.”  
  
“Excellent,” Erlos said. “Would you mind helping me stable my horse?”  
  
Grendeen shrugged; he was in no hurry, and the stables were warmer than the open street. He led Erlos and his horse through the archway and to the stables; a lamp stood out in the courtyard between the inn and stables, illuminating the empty stall immediately opposite the door. In the lamp light, Grendeen could see him more clearly; he wore a full helmet, but with the visor raised Grendeen could see a trimmed black beard lined his square jaw; at his hip hung a round shield, a circle which hung the full depth of his horse’s flank.  
  
He rode into the stall and lifted the shield from where it hung; behind it was nothing but the horse’s barded flank. There was no stirrup, nor was there a leg to reach the stirrup.  
  
He turned in the saddle, not a leg to swing over from the other side either, and grasped the shield in both hands; he pulled it apart into two discs, between which a metal frame unfolded with a series of clicks.  
  
“Could you take this and place it down – just there, please, such that it’s facing towards me,” he said, indicating the ground to the side of the saddle. Grendeen hesitated. “Don’t worry, it’s not very heavy.” Erlos knew that wasn’t the reason for his hesitation, but it seemed to make Grendeen more comfortable. He took the unfolded shield and placed it down; the shield’s two halves were not parallel but tilted slightly, such that they were closer at the top than at their base, attached to the frame by a metal bar at the centre of each, about which they could turn freely. Two sheets of leather stretched out between the shields forming the back and seat of a chair; a pair of arms reaching out forwards from either the chair ended in a small wheel.  
  
Erlos turned so that his back was to the chair, gripped a length of rope attached to the horn of the saddle, leaned back and climbed down into the seat. He took off his helmet, allowing a short black ponytail to drop down to the nape of his neck, and reached over his back, hanging the helmet from a horn on the back of the chair.  
  
“Thank you, Grendeen,” he said with a smile. “That can be something of a hassle in the dark on one’s own.”  
  
“Um, sure, not a problem,” Grendeen stammered.  
  
“I would bring Greycastle in,” Erlos laughed, patting the horse’s side, “But there are only so many ‘why the long face’ jokes one can hear, and her shoes tend to make a mess of wooden floors.”  
  
Grendeen could not take his eyes off the chair contraption. Erlos put a hand on the rim of the shield and turned it to face Grendeen.  
  
“Come now,” he said with a smile. “You have questions you want to ask, I can see that; don’t worry, everyone has.  
  
Grendeen gulped. “Have you… Have you always had no legs?”  
  
“As long as my name’s been Erlos,” he responded. This was technically true, after all. Before he lost his legs, he had no name to tell of.  
  
They wouldn’t have known what to call at the gallows.  
  
“So have you ridden a horse all of your life?”  
  
“Since I was too heavy for my parents to carry me,” he said with a sigh, pushing the chair out of the stall, leading Grendeen out of the stables, into the pool of light around the lamp outside. “I rode with the guards around our town to find my feet, as it were. Gives a real taste for the world, riding through the forests and roads, seeing the wanderers come and go. After a while I got an itch to do the same – to take what I’d learned, patrolling, protecting the town, and take those lessons wherever Greycastle would carry me.”  
  
The scars under his armour told a very different story.

  
  


It was true that he plied his trade in the forests and roads around the town, but such is the home of all bandits.  
  
This was where the dregs of society crouched in the undergrowth, clung in the canopy – far from riding with the guard, they could smell them a mile off. Caravans of traders were their larder, bread and cheese and wine, rations or wares.  
It was true that meeting with adventurers on the road led him here.  
  
Never bite off more than you can chew, that was the bandits’ sole creed. The wealthy were better defended, an adventuring party stronger than its numbers. But on a winter such as this, when the roads were quiet, when the woods offered little cover, hunger and desperation set in. Guards and penniless wanderers all who passed their way, a glimmer of gold was more than they could resist.  
  
Like fools, they took the bait. Under that gilding was hidden swords and shields; arrows and spells filled the air and there was no retreat to make.  
  
The fireball which took his legs cauterised the wound. As consciousness slipped away, he saw his hooded companions fall one-by-one.  
He awoke, hands bound, legs gone, surrounded by the band of adventurers.

  
  


Grendeen opened the door for Erlos, who forced the chair over the threshold. Grendeen stayed outside, shuffling awkwardly.  
  
“I was just on my way home,” he said  
  
“Plenty of time to be at home,” Erlos laughed. “Come, let me buy you a drink to say thanks.”  
  
The rims of the wheels rumbled across the floor; Erlos smiled and pretended not to notice as every eye in the room followed him to the bar. Eryn leaned her elbows on the bar.  
  
“Good evening, ma’am,” Erlos said cheerfully. “May I ask how much to stable my horse here for the night?”  
  
“That’ll be five silver,” she said. “Will you want a room yourself?”  
  
“Well I’m afraid that somewhat depends,” Erlos laughed as he reached into a leather pouch by his side, pulling out his coin purse. “May I ask, your beds, are they upstairs?”  
  
“Not all of them,” Eryn said, pointing to the door under the stairs. “We have one free through there, just past the back room.”  
  
“Excellent,” he said with a smile. “A stall, a room and two beers then, please.” He said, placing a handful of coins on the bar; he looked over his shoulder; “What do you recommend, Grendeen?”  
  
“Oh… um, I’ve been on the blonde most of tonight, so,” Grendeen muttered awkwardly.  
  
Erlos raised an eyebrow at him. “On whom?”  
  
“No, no!” Grendeen stammered, raising his hands as Eryn stifled a laugh. “The blonde beer!”

  
  


Grendeen carried their beers from the bar sat at the end of the bench at the long table; Erlos pushed his chair up to the end of it and took one of the glasses.  
  
“So have you been on the road ever since?”  
  
“Never looked back,” Erlos said, and took a swig. This, at least, was true.  
  
When the guard patrol came by, Erlos was alone, dressed in a merchant’s robes. They took him for a victim, brought him back to the town.  
  
The town cared for him, pitied him. The stable-owner Greycastle raised the horse for him to ride, fashioned him a saddle, and he rode with the guard. Rode the same tracks he once haunted.  
  
He knew where bandits would hide, where highwaymen struck, and he knew the flaws in the guards’ patrol. But he also knew that sooner or later, someone would recognise him. Someone who had escaped or been spared. Every day, riding in and out of town, he saw the posters, the notices, the list of his crimes. Erlos had earned the respect of the town, while his nameless former self still held their revile. The balance was untenable.  
  
“So, are you a paladin? A knight against all evildoers, sort of thing.”  
  
“No, no,” Erlos laughed. He didn’t believe any god would take him as a paladin. “No, I don’t truly believe there is such a thing as an evil person.”  
  
Grendeen raised an eyebrow. “Really? You’ve been on different roads to most people, then.”  
  
“No, I believe there are evil deeds, there are certainly evil creatures, monsters who live by cruelty,” he said. “But not evil people.”  
  
“Isn’t a person who commits an evil deed evil?” Grendeen felt too many pints had passed for philosophy.  
  
“A person who commits an evil deed is a person,” Erlos said, lifting his head. “People have the potential for good, the ability to commit evil; they have the capacity to turn to good, as they have the chance to turn to villainy. Our part is merely to make of people we meet the best person we can.”  
  
Grendeen looked at Dalkinic out of the corner of his eye. Best not bring that back up again, he thought.  
  
Erlos looked around the room. A few tables over, he saw a pair of Elves. He smiled to himself, hidden from Grendeen by his beard.  
  
“An old friend on the road taught me that,” he said with a smile. “Everyone needs their shot at redemption.”


	7. Non Est Factum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A warlock is an individual who has made a pact with a greater power in exchange for great power... but who hasn't signed a contract without reading it, right?

The door opened wide enough for a young man, barely more than a child, to tiptoe in, pushing it to behind him. He wore simple clothes, his hair spiked out of his face, and he carried a large book, bound in deep red leather with a sheen like oil on skin, covered in dark metal rivets and symbols. He sidled up to the bar nervously.  
  
“Hi, can I have a, um, a pint of ale, please?”  
  
Eryn narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “How old are you?”  
  
He pulled himself up indignantly. “I’m twenty-three!”  
  
She didn’t look convinced. He sighed.  
  
“Just water then, please.”  
  
She smiled. “Right you are.”  
  
She returned a moment later with a glass of water, placed it down and leaned on the bar, eyes on the book. “So. You’re a wizard, then?”  
  
He floundered for a second, followed her eyes, and looked back up with an uneasy grin. “Erm, yes. Yep, a wizard. Well a student wizard. Studying to be a wizard.”  
  
“Up at the college?”  
  
“Yes, definitely. Student at the college.”  
  
Eryn raised her eyebrow at him. “Second student from the college we’ve had tonight,” she said, clearly unconvinced. She nodded her head in the direction of Diana, her head back buried in her books.  
  
He looked around excitedly, saw the library with Diana’s head poking out, took the glass and tottered over.  
  
Hedler snorted. “At least he didn’t forget his water.”  
  
The boy put his glass on Diana’s table and waved at her. She looked up, frowned a little and waved back, and he sat down.  
  
“Hi, the landlady says you’re a student at the college?”  
  
Diana perked up, glancing at his book. “Yes – well, sort of – researcher now. Are you studying there?”  
  
“Yes! Yeah,” he stammered. He grinned and clicked his fingers, and a green flame appeared above his hand. “My name’s Cecil – I’m a student… Wizard. Wizard student.”  
  
“I’m Diana,” she said, extending a hand and shaking his awkwardly. “What are you studying?”  
  
His eyes widened and he pursed his lips. “… Magic,” he said at length.  
  
Diana narrowed her eyes at him. “Well, yes, I got that. But what in particular?”  
  
“Oh, right, um…” he paused again, shaking a little. “… Spells?” Diana scowled. “OK, I didn’t get into the college.”  
  
“So you’re not a student.”  
  
“No…”  
  
“Nor a wizard.”  
  
“I don’t really know that part.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean I think,” he looked at the book in his hand. “I think I’m technically a warlock?”  
  
Diana let out a snort of laughter. “How can you be technically a warlock?”  
  
“I don’t know,” he said exasperatedly. “When I didn’t get into the college I decided to teach myself, so I bought a book on it.” He put the book on the table and Diana’s eyes widened, scanning the inlaid runes which dotted the cover. “But I can’t even read the book.”  
  
“It’s in Infernal!” she hissed.  
  
“Oh that’s what it is?” He picked it up and looked at it. “Huh. That would explain things.”  
  
“Where did you get it?”  
  
“There was a travelling salesman at the market,” he explained. “When I told him I was looking to learn magic he gave me this.”  
  
“Gave you? Not sold?”  
  
“Just gave it to me,” he said with a shrug. “Said something about daily commitment, I just thought he meant it’d be hard work.”  
  
“Well, it is,” Diana said with a scowl.  
  
“But I can’t read it!” he said. “I can’t do any work at all but I know it anyway!”  
  
“So what’s the daily commitment?”  
  
He sighed. “Every day, I have to use at least one spell I’ve learned for evil.”  
  
“Or what?”  
  
“Or one gets used on me,” he cringed. “And some of them really hurt!”  
  
Diana winced. “So what was today, then?”  
  
Cecil frowned. “What do you mean what was today?”  
  
“What was the evil you did with it today?”  
  
Slowly, his frown became a look of concern. “Oh, oh no, oh I forgot...” He looked around urgently. “What time is it?”  
  
“Probably just coming up midnight, I think?” Diana said apologetically.  
  
“Oh, no no no, um – I need something fast – ohhh, I don’t want to get thrown out…”  
  
“Steal someone’s food! Or a chair or something!”  
  
“That doesn’t use magic! And I’ll still get thrown out!”  
  
“Extinguish the lights!”  
  
“That’s not evil,” he hissed, “It’s just rude!”  
  
“Oh, I have it, quick!” Diana snapped, holding up her glass; “Poison my drink and I’ll pour it away!”  
  
He flapped exasperatedly. “Well I can’t do that now!” he said.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because you’ve told me to,” he almost cried.  
  
She looked almost shocked. “What’s wrong with that?”  
  
“Because you’re not evil, you’re trying to help me!”  
  
“I might be evil,” she said quietly; “You don’t know! And even if I’m not, it’s my drink, so you’ve poisoned someone not evil.”  
  
“But you’d know it was poisoned! You already said you’d throw it away.”  
  
She thought for a second. “Oh! But I might use it to poison someone else!”  
  
“But that’s you being evil not me!”  
  
“Poison someone else’s then? Just enough to make them feel queasy in the morning – most people in here will anyway!”  
  
“No, it has to be something original,” he said quickly, “I need to think of it myself, I can’t just be following instruction, apparently that’s not evil enough.”  
  
“How do you know?”  
  
“Because last time I did that I was set on fire.”  
  
“Oh…” She put the glass down slowly.  
  
Cecil stopped flapping suddenly. He clapped his hands in-front of his face with a look of realisation.  
  
“I’m really sorry, I have to,” he stammered quickly. A green light flashed across his eyes like lightning rolling behind clouds and he spat a single word.  
  
“Slap!”  
  
Diana slapped him hard around the face. The blow knocked him from the chair and Diana gasped. The room fell silent for a moment as every face turned to see what had just happened.  
  
“Are you OK?”  
  
He pulled himself back into his chair, blinking slowly, a red mark on his face. “I don’t really know what I expected,” he said quietly. He held a hand to his face and moved his jaw from side to side. “I think that should technically count, though?”  
  
“Was that a spell used for evil or a spell used against you?”  
  
He paused. “I think possibly both?”  
  
They laughed nervously. One by one, the other people in the bar turned back to their conversations with just the odd glance over at their table.  
  
“So whom did you actually make the pact with?”  
  
“I don’t think I did,” Cecil said uncertainly. “I mean, I don’t think the vendor at the market was a devil or anything.”  
  
Diana pointed at her horns. “Don’t trust a look for devils.”  
  
“No I mean he just seemed glad to be shut of it.”  
  
“Ah…” Diana thought for a moment. “Wait, have you tried giving it to anyone else?”  
  
“I tried handing it in to the library but they wouldn’t take it,” he said. “I gave it to someone else on market day a while back and when I woke up the next day it was on my pillow.”  
  
“Strange…”  
  
“And also my bed was full of spiders.”  
  
“Ugh, no,” Diana put up her hands.  
  
“So I’ve mostly avoided putting it down since then,” he said with a shudder.  
  
“Have you done anything with the book? Other than read it?”  
  
Cecil looked down sheepishly and mumbled something into his chin.  
  
“Sorry?”  
  
“I wrote my name in it.”  
  
Diana put her head down on the table. “Why would you even do that?”  
  
“I don’t know, I didn’t want to lose it, I think I wanted to have some proof that something magical was mine?” He shrugged. “It just suddenly felt like a really good idea to put my name in it.”  
  
Diana lifted her head up. “Can I see?”  
  
He opened the front cover and turned the book around so she could see. At the bottom of a page of Infernal script was an empty space where Cecil’s name had been written carefully.  
  
“It was the only space I could find to write it,” he said with a shrug.  
  
“And you don’t know what any of this means.”  
  
He shook his head. “I wanted to get it translated at some point but when things started going weird I thought I’d best just try and get rid of it.”  
  
Diana put her head in her hand. “You’ve signed your name under a devil’s contract,” she sighed.  
  
“Oh,” Cecil whispered at length. “That would explain a lot.”  
  
“No, it might be all right,” Diana said with a sigh. “A contract’s a contract, and even devil law has rules,” she said. “If you didn’t know what you were signing, the whole thing might be null and void.”  
  
He perked up. “So I can just go to using magic for what I want to use it for? Without the whole… evil thing?”  
  
“I don’t think so.” He sagged again. “That’s what you get out of it, the devil gets – well your soul, one day at a time.”  
  
“What if I just tore out that page and burned it? If that’s the problem,” he suggested. Diana shook her head urgently.  
  
“I really, really don’t advise that,” she said sharply.  
  
“So…” he stared at the contract, at his signature. “You’re saying I need to find a lawyer.”  
  
“A devil lawyer,” Diana said with a nod.  
  
“How different are they from mortal lawyers?”  
  
“Not very much, I don’t think.”  
  
“And best case scenario is that I’m back to not having magic any more?”  
  
Diana shrugged. “I’m not a lawyer.”  
  
“What about if I got it translated, so I could actually learn it for myself without the terms and conditions?”  
  
Diana flipped through the book. “I’d say only about a tenth of this is actually spells. The rest’s just smallprint.”  
  
Cecil sighed. He closed the book and picked up his glass of water. He took a sip and placed it back on the table dejectedly.  
  
“You know,” he said sadly, “I don’t think that spell will have counted as evil enough.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because my drink’s been poisoned.”


	8. A Song of Two Halves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was an idea from my wife Jen, at which we laughed for about an hour; it was a fun exercise in things not being what they seem, and a re-dressing of an old joke. I'll say no more, and let you see for yourselves.

The door swung wide and in swayed a woman in a long, golden yellow dress with sweeping sleeves, red hair rolling down onto her shoulders in ringlets. She reached her arm out only a very short distance to grasp the edge of the door at her shoulder level with a small hand, closing it behind her with a twirl, before returning her hand to the side of her chest, level with the other.  
  
She glided toward the bar with her arms held still at her chest height, with an almost eerie grace given by the imperceptibly small movement of her legs under the dress in sharp contrast with the mischievous grin on her round, childlike face. She stood between two bar stools and leaned forward onto the bar, resting the palms of her hands on it, her sleeves hanging off the edge of the bar.  
  
“Good evening,” she said brightly.  
  
“Evening, luv, what can I get for you?”  
  
“Two halves, please.”  
  
Eryn paused and nodded slowly. “Two halves. Right. Blonde or wheat?”  
  
“Ooh, one half of each please.”  
  
“You can sit down, you know,” said Rikker, looking at the way she was leaning awkwardly on the bar. “No need to stand on ceremony.”  
  
“Oh, no thanks,” she laughed. “Not really a fan of sitting down.”  
  
“Right…”  
  
Eryn slid two half pint glasses over the bar; the woman took the glass of blonde beer and placed it on the bar-stool next to her, and took a sip of the wheat.  
  
Rikker turned to face her. “So what do you do, then?”  
  
She put the beer back down again. “Oh, I’m a bard. A jester, really.”  
  
“In that dress?”  
  
The woman looked down herself. “Of course. Why not?”  
  
“It just doesn’t look like it would lend itself particularly well to acrobatics or the like.”  
  
The woman chuckled. “There is more to a jester than high tumbling,” she said with a wicked grin. “For many it is enough simply to entertain in the moment: a daring leap may dazzle for a minute, a song may stay in your head for days, but a trick so confusing that years later, you still lie awake wondering how it was done? That’s where we get our satisfaction.”  
  
Eryn raised her eyebrow. “We?”  
  
The woman hesitated and twitched a little, as though something had knocked her leg, and her smile faltered a little. “Jesters. We jesters. Myself and other jesters like me.”  
  
Rikker cracked a smile at her. “Well, go on then,” she said. “You can’t just say something like that and not show us.”  
  
The woman grinned broadly. “Oh, but wouldn’t it just madden you if I did?”  
  
“Oh, but you could leave us all thinking you were just having us on,” Eryn retorted. “What if we didn’t believe you? Wouldn’t that just madden you?”  
  
The woman laughed. “I like your style,” she said.  
  
She turned to face him, turning her back on the beer she had placed on the bar stool. Seemingly from thin air, she suddenly produced a puppet, a wooden doll with a matching grin to her own, and sat it on the bar beside her.  
  
“Where the hells did that come from?” Rikker pluttered. The doll’s head turned to him as the woman returned to her drink.  
  
“Well there’s a fine how do you do, I could say the same to you,” the doll answered sharply. Rikker looked from the doll to the woman who was visibly swallowing her beer as it spoke.  
  
“It’s good,” he said with a snort. “But I don’t see it keeping me up at night,”  
  
“Is that so,” the puppet said as its puppeteer placed down her empty glass on the bar behind it. “Sorry, I don’t think I caught your name?”  
  
“Rikker Sladder,” he said proudly.  
  
“It’s a pleasure.” The puppet extended a hand.  
  
Rikker blinked at it a few times, staring at the tiny wooden hand raised towards him, then shook it with a thumb and forefinger. “All right, that’s a new one,” he said. He realised he was shaking a puppet’s hand, took his hand away and returned to addressing its holder. “And who are you, then?”  
  
“Oh, so sorry,” the woman laughed, “We completely forgot to introduce ourselves.”  
  
The puppet looked up at her. “Oh, shall we?”  
  
Both heads turned to Rikker, and the woman began singing.  
  
“Oh, my name it is Yaffi,”  
  
“And mine it is Ann,” the puppet continued.  
  
“We’ve roamed and we’ve wandered all over this land,” the two sang together in harmony.  
  
“Well I’ll be,” Hedler whispered in his brother’s ear.  
  
“That’s a new one too.”  
  
“That has to be magic,” Hedler said with a scowl.  
  
“Bards are magical types, after all,” Solker added.  
  
Rikker hushed them with a wave  
  
“We work out our living  
  
Through laughter and smiles,  
  
That you’ll find left behind us for two hundred miles!”  
  
Yaffi (if the song was to be believed) took out a small wooden flute, again seemingly from nowhere, taking her hand from the puppet Ann’s back, and began to play the same tune she had just been singing, head tipped back toward the ceiling and eyes closed. The puppet rested against her where she had taken her hand from it, its head pointed to look up as she played.  
  
Every conversation in the tavern had hushed, every face turned to watch the show, necks craning to see what Yaffi was doing; some simply taking in the song, others laughing in wonder  
  
Suddenly, the puppet turned to look around Yaffi to the people behind her. “Bit of a show-off, isn’t she?”  
  
Rikker all but spat out his beer. His eyes shot from the puppet, to Yaffi’s face, to her hands, both on the flute. Laughter erupted around the inn, and from the fireside Dalkinic stood, shaking his head with a broad, beaming smile, clapping his hands.  
  
“Never mind,” Ann said, looking back to Rikker. “I can do the next verse by myself, then.”  
  
The Sladders exchanged a look, shaking heads, shrugging shoulders.  
  
“We’ve danced over mountains,  
  
We’ve sung o’er the seas,  
  
Our voices have carried through fields and through trees,  
  
We’ve played for the poor  
  
And for queen and for king,  
  
And now we are here, it’s for you we will sing!”  
  
Yaffi twirled the flute from her mouth and it disappeared once more, and she joined back in the song.  
  
“So fill up your glasses,  
  
And then fill up ours,  
  
And drink the night on to the morning’s bright hours,”  
  
“My name it is Yaffi,”  
  
“And mine it is Ann,”  
  
The last line she slowed down, her voice taking the descant and Ann’s voice taking the melody.  
  
“And we hope that one day we’ll sing for you again!”  
  
As the song drew to a close, the room erupted in applause. Yaffi curtsied slightly, bobbing her head, her cheeky grin once more stretched from ear to ear.  
  
Rikker picked up the puppet Ann, turning it around. It was a simple doll with wooden hands and feet hanging from cloth-wrapped wooden arms and legs, a hole in the back large enough for a hand smaller than his own.  
  
“That has to be magic, right?” Hadler said, waving his glass at the doll. “I’ve seen the drinking and talking trick but that singing and stuff was magic. That has to be cheating, right?”  
  
“I’m afraid not,” Dalkinic’s voice came with a laugh. He was standing on the bucket to see over the heads of the other drinkers watching, who now turned to him. “I can detect magic: there’s none to the doll and I was watching throughout: she didn’t cast a single spell.”  
  
Hedler scowled; he wasn’t about to take the Gnome’s word without a large pinch of salt. “Anyone else?”  
  
Diana shook her head. “He’s right, I checked too.”  
  
“Well I’ll be,” he said again. Rikker handed the doll back.  
  
“There were no spells, no enchantments, no incantations,” Yaffi said with a flourish. Suddenly the puppet was nowhere to be seen. “But maybe there is a certain magic which only exists in the eye of the beholder.”  
  
“No there isn’t”, Diana mumbled, half to herself. “There is no magic in the eye of a Beholder, that’s the whole thing about Beholders…”  
  
“I don’t think that’s what she meant,” Cecil whispered. There was a ripple of laughter around them and Diane blushed purple.  
  
Yaffi held up her hands. “Sorry, that was a bad choice of words. What I mean is, we used to call everything we didn’t understand magic, and understanding it makes it that little bit less magical. So maybe if I can leave you with no understanding but that what I did wasn’t magic, maybe it really was after all.”  
  
There was another laugh, and the Sladder brothers shrugged at one another again. One by one, people went back to their conversations, each face a little brighter, each smile a little wider.  
  
Yaffi turned back to the bar and flashed Eryn a grin and a wink. Eryn stood with a hand on her hip and a smile on her face, shaking her head slowly.  
  
“All right then, how do you do that.”  
  
Yaffi waggled a finger. “Now now, you know I’m not going to answer that.”  
  
“Oh come on,” Eryn entreated, leaning close over the bar to her. “Just for me.”  
  
“I couldn’t do that to you.”  
  
“To me?”  
  
“Steal the magic away,” she laughed. “You’ve only had half the fun. The song’s over, the dance is done, but you still get to enjoy this part, the part where you try to figure me out. It’s no fun being told how the trick’s done.” She leaned in a little closer to Eryn and lowered her voice. “But I think you’ve a good shot at figuring it out yourself.”  
  
Eryn raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think that?”  
  
“Oh, I just have a hint,” Yaffi giggled. She glanced sideways at the Sladders and, seeing they were deep in their own conversation, picked up the empty glass from the barstool beside her and put it next to the other.  
  
“Two halves, please.”


	9. Scars' Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Many a character's story is written across their body, wounds from battles past. But there is a potential source of scars which is a part of every D&D game, with some of the best stories you'll tell and will laugh about with those you played with for years to come.  
>   
> Wear your failures with pride.

The cold wind shook the lamps once more. Eyes were drawn to the door by the clinking of metal; in the doorway stood a Dwarf, her arms bared despite the cold, a long, deep scar running down one; her hair was tucked behind one ear, but the other was torn and her hair hung loose, the wind lazily pulling it over her face; the eye clear of her hair glinted keenly, sapphire in the orange light; a scar ran from her cheek to her brow on the other side, a leather eye patch held tightly over the socket.  
  
In one hand, she carried a halberd; with the other, she pushed shut the door. The last finger from that hand was missing.  
  
She strode up to the bar, leaning on the halberd as she did; one foot landed with a heavier, hollower clank than the other with each step.  
  
She pulled herself up an empty bar stool and leaned the halberd off to the same side as her scarred eye.  
  
The Sladder brothers sat on her blind side, leaning around one another to get a better look at her.  
  
Eryn walked past them to her end of the bar.  
  
“What can I get for you?”  
  
“Something warming,” she said, gruffly but softly. “Do you have brandy?”  
  
“Certainly do.” Eryn took down a small glass from the shelves behind the bar and pulled out a dark bottle from below the bar, filling the glass with copper coloured spirit.  
  
“Half a silver, please.”  
  
The Dwarf fished in her purse with the three fingers on her scarred hand dropped a small handful of copper into Eryn’s.  
  
As she drank the brandy, she became aware that she was no longer sitting on her own. She looked either way to see the Sladder brothers now sitting around her with goofy smiles tucked under their beards.  
  
“You look like you’ve been in the wars, lass,” Hedler said.  
  
“Aye,” she said with a grin. “It’s a price you pay when you take up arms against the forces of darkness.”  
  
“Looks like a hell of a fight,” Solker said with admiration.  
  
“Oh, not one fight,” she laughed; with her good hand, she pulled back a pauldron to show another scar, a red line across her shoulder where it met her neck. “Each tells its own story. This one started it all.”  
  
“How did that happen, then?” Rikker asked eagerly, craning his neck.  
  
She put down her glass and painted the scene with her hands.  
  
“A pilgrim came to our town, wishing to worship at the temple. Once he was inside, he revealed himself to be not a righteous pilgrim a necromancer, and raised an army of our very ancestors to take the town from us.” The brothers gasped. “Our town was but small, isolated, by the time we could call for aid all would be lost. With each of us who fell, his forces grew stronger.”  
  
“Under a holy oath, we swore that we would bring peace to our ancestors, and sanctity to our home, or we would die trying, but our souls would never be his to command. We called on Moradin to protect our souls, that we may continue to fight even if our bodies were broken.  
  
“We all took up arms; though our numbers were few, our resolve was strong. We fought with the holy might of Moradin behind us. With every cleave, the light of his forge fire pierced the darkness.  
  
“A month we fought, pressing their lines back, freeing our ancestors and our fallen comrades from the clutches of the necromancer, to the very last.  
  
“We few who took the oath and lived that day were honoured with the highest of rewards; placing an axe on our shoulders, we were invested as paladins to take Moradin’s fire out into the world and cleanse it of darkness.”  
  
The brothers sat in silence for a moment; then, Rikker spoke.  
  
“But how did that scar happen?”  
  
“Oh,” she chuckled. “I stood up before the investiture was finished, right into the axe. Learned my lesson that day: always wear a pauldron.”  
  
The brothers looked at one another for a moment, then laughed nervously.  
  
“So,” Hedler said eventually. “How did you lose that finger?”  
  
“Ah,” she grinned again. “Now there’s a memorable fight.  
  
“I was travelling not with other paladins, not even with other Dwarves, but with a misfit band of wanderers, alongside an assassin, a mage and a druid from the wilderness.  
  
“As we made camp by night, before we had decided on who would take watch, we were set upon. A pack of hobgoblins invaded our camp, a bugbear among them. They thought they would have us easily but they underestimated us.  
  
“Our mage turned the very fire against them, trapping some within whirling flames; our druid leapt towards their leader – before he even reached his target, he had become a wolf, teeth bared.  
  
“I came toe to toe with the bugbear; it loomed over me, a great blade of rusted iron in its hand. With this halberd, I parried it blow-for-blow, but I could get no hit of my own against it but then, I heard it let out a cry of pain.  
  
“It fell to its knees, and behind it, I see our assassin, his hand at its back, a blade from his sleeve buried deep in its hide.”  
  
“So the bugbear,” Hedler said eagerly, “Did it take your finger as you blocked its sword with the shaft of the halberd?”  
  
“Ah, no,” she said, shaking her head and taking another sip of the brandy. “I went to shake the assassin’s hand to congratulate him for a job well done but I accidentally set off the trigger for the blade in his sleeve. Went straight through the bone.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“I had some good adventures with that lot,” she said with a nostalgic chuckle. “I lost an eye, you know.”  
  
“Really,” Sokler said flatly, looking at her eyepatch and the scar which passed behind it. “And how did that happen?”  
  
She pointed to the weapon at her blind side. “See this halberd?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I don’t.” She chuckled. “It’s spilt the blood of more goblins than could fit in this inn, and that was in one day,” she said proudly. “And that was in one day.”  
  
“What in the hells happened that day?” Hedler said, wide-eyed.  
  
“Well. We tracked the Hobgoblins back whence they came, and we fell upon an encampment; now, they were organised, they were prepared,” she hissed. “This wasn’t just some ragbag bunch, this was a warband, like nothing I ever saw before; they were geared up for a siege.  
  
“Our mage led the assault, hurled lightning down upon them; they didn’t know where the spell was coming from and while we had them surprised, we struck.  
  
“I was wading through them, there were so many, each swing taking two, maybe three down to the ground. But they had archers around the walls of the encampment.”  
  
“Ah, and you were a prime target?” Hedler said excitedly. “And one of them got a lucky shot to your eye?”  
  
“Ah no,” she said; “While they were focused on me, our assassin was at their backs, tearing around the walls.  
  
“Now I broke through the ranks with their swords and knives but at the back, they were bristling with spears and javelins.”  
  
“Ooh, now they can get past what a sword can’t,” Rikker said. “One of those could easily spell the end of an eye.”  
  
“Ah but a halberd can reach far too,” she laughed. “No, their spears were splintered before me, and served only as kindling for the pyre. I stood atop the pile ready to burn, leaning on my halberd, and I raised a prayer to Moradin to cleanse this land of their foul presence.”  
  
The brothers looked at her in silence again. “But when did you lose your eye?”  
  
“Ah.” She lifted the halberd and held it towards them. “You see this spike on the back of the blade? Well if you’re ever standing on a slightly unstable pile of dead goblins and use a halberd for stability, just point that bit away from your face, aye?” She put the halberd back down and took another sip of brandy. “Never quite did live that down.”  
  
“No, I’ll bet,” Hedler said. He took a swig of beer. “Is that how you lost that ear, too?”  
  
“Ah no,” she said with a laugh. “That was at an inn, like this. The beer and wine had been flowing; there was a celebration, I forget what for. But you know how some can get when too much drink has passed. In the wee small hours of the morning, a fight starts. Now, I just wanted to have a quiet drink and celebrate whatever it was we were celebrating, I’m sure it was worth celebrating. But not worth starting a fight over.  
  
“So I step in, I pull them aside, a Halfling and an Elf. Now the Halfling’s had a few too many by this point but I’m not exactly the picture of sobriety neither. But while my back’s turned, he pulls out a knife.”  
  
The Sladders gasped as one; roving bands of goblins was one matter, but interrupting a friendly drink was simply sacrosanct.  
  
“The bastard!” Rikker spat. “And he had your ear off?”  
  
“Nay, last thing I remember about that night was beating the broad daylights out of him,” she said, turning back to her drink with a shrug. “Haven’t the foggiest where my ear went after that but it wasn’t on my pillow in the morning.”  
  
The brothers looked glumly at their own drinks for a second. Then Rikker saw the scar running down her arm again.  
  
“What about that one?” he asked, gesturing to it with his glass. “What’s its story?”  
  
“Ah now that’s where I got this armour,” she said, tapping on her breastplate. “When I first saw this, it was being worn by a blackguard – a paladin once like myself, but she’d broken her oath, now she was no more in Moradin’s eye than a thieving bandit.  
  
“I was alone now, no longer with the band with whom I’d roamed the years before. We matched each other like for like, blow for blow, step for step, but I had Moradin’s might on my side. She swung her greataxe with power, but I returned each blow with righteous fury.”  
  
They looked at the scar. In their minds’ eyes, they saw an axe swing trace that line down her arm.  
  
“I’m sure it was by that alone I was able to overcome her.” She pointed at the emblem of Moradin embossed on the breastplate. “She wasn’t worthy of this armour, to carry his sign. I left her alive, but unarmoured; I shattered her axe, and I left her broken for the guard.”  
  
“But not before she did you some harm, we see?” Hedler said.  
  
“Ah no,” she said. “Turned out I’d dinted the shoulder of the plate under the pauldron and there was a sharp edge pointing inwards. Did a number on me putting it on.”  
  
She finished her brandy.  
  
“Every scar tells a story,” she said again. “It just might not be a very good part of the story.”


	10. Shift Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ranger has a prey which they hunt relentlessly and they know the fine minutiae of, a sworn enemy of not an individual but a species, or a type of monster. One such monster is the entirely unknowable source of endless paranoia: the Mimic. This... is an interesting combination.
> 
> On a side note, I'm going to be away from stable internet for the weekend; hopefully I'll be able to keep uploading, but I may well not attach a summary for the next two when they go up.

A bang at the door jolted conversations to silence. In the hush, it opened slowly. On the other side stood an Elf, one sword drawn, his other hand at the hilt of a second blade, glaring suspiciously at the door.  
  
His face, eyes narrowed and lips pursed, was shadowed by long, straggly black hair. Down his back hung a stone-grey cloak.  
  
He looked up at the perplexed looks which greeted him and slid the sword back into its scabbard.  
  
“You can never be too careful,” he said slowly, closing the door behind himself.  
  
His eyes flicked from side to side as he crossed to the bar, his piercing glare never settling on any people, but it was a bad day to be furniture.  
  
He snatched a bar stool firmly, holding it up to his eye, inspecting the grain of the wood with venom.  
  
Eryn put her hands on her hips. “Carpentry business got a bit competitive, has it?”  
  
Seemingly begrudgingly satisfied, he lowered himself onto the seat, sitting on his cloak.  
  
“You can never be too careful,” he whispered.  
  
“You take splinters very seriously,” Eryn said. “History of lockjaw?”  
  
“No, not splinters,” he hissed ominously. “Teeth.”  
  
Suddenly he drew a dagger, pressing it to the edge of the bar, watching it rigidly. After a few seconds of staring at it he finally put the blade away, satisfied enough to lean on the surface.  
  
“I guarantee you none of the furniture in my inn has teeth,” she said irritably. “It’s never been a popular request for features people would want to improve their stay.”  
  
“Ah,” he said, raising a finger, “But what if it only wants you to think it’s furniture?”  
  
Eryn blinked slowly at him. This was the sort of conversation normally had after someone had already ordered and finished off several drinks, not before ordering their first.  
  
“What do you know…” he looked either way, leaned closer and whispered “... of the Mimic?”  
  
“Treasure chest that eats people,” Eryn said. He hushed her.  
  
“Not so loud,” he muttered. “They may not have ears that we can see, but they can still hear.” He looked about again. “Not just chests. The Mimic can take any form it wishes. I have seen a group of Mimics hidden deep in the woods take the form of an abandoned campsite; when wanderers in the woods happened upon it, tired and lost, they could not resist the comfort of a simple tent, and they had no fight in them when they struck at the fall of night. I’ve heard tale of mimics who take the form of whole buildings - shelter from the storm, light at the windows, the glimmer of precious metals from within. By the time explorers discover that they have fallen foul of its trap, they are already within the belly of the beast. I’ve seen mimics twist their hideous forms into people, lead their victims down dark alleys and abandoned buildings, where their screams will be masked from the crowds they have strayed from when they discover they have been betrayed.”  
  
Eryn’s eyes widened at this. “You’ve seen one imitate a person?”  
  
“I haven’t seen the Mimic take that shape directly,” he said, “But the signs were all there. People disappearing from the city, regular enough that most of the people didn’t venture into the alleys by night, yet no-one saw any creature.”  
“Maybe because there wasn’t one?”  
  
“Ah, that’s exactly how the Mimic catches you though. There is no Mimic, of course, just a chest of gold, or an unlocked door.”  
  
“So how did you know it was a Mimic and not, for example, regular criminals?”  
  
“Such is the skill of the Mimic that I was unable to prove this to the people,” he said.  
  
“So you didn’t actually see a Mimic there at all?”  
  
“Many times I thought I had it but had simply fallen for its cunning decoys.”  
  
“Decoys?”  
  
“Real furniture,” he said with scorn. “Once I thought I’d caught it, I heard the screams ahead of me but it was merely a band of lowlife thugs. I thought my chances would improve once they were in the jail out of my way but it must have sensed I was close and the killings stopped almost instantly after I took out the marauders.”  
  
“Fancy that.”  
  
“So when I heard the tale of the notice leading people here I knew I had to investigate.”  
  
“Investigate what?”  
  
“It could very easily have been that Mimic’s trap,” he said. “That is, after all, a logical extension of their usual strategy, their mode of operation - they lure in the inquisitive with promise of what they crave - usually riches, but glory, freedom, anything they know their prey cannot resist. Then they simply have to lie in wait.”  
  
“The bill poster’s just sitting over there,” Eryn said. “It didn’t extrude out of the woodwork or anything, I pinned it to the wall.”  
  
The Elf peered into the darkness, at the hooded figure, then whirled back to Eryn.  
  
“And how can you be sure he’s not a Mimic?”  
  
“Luv, I’m not even half sure he’s a he,” she said with a sigh.  
  
“Why sit out of sight, obscured in shadow, hiding your face? What to hide? Why, of all the inn, would you choose that corner?” he said, raising an eyebrow.  
  
“Because it builds mystery and I don’t charge extra for it,” Eryn said simply. “Makes for a good first impression.”  
  
“So does a chest brimming with jewels, doesn’t it?”  
  
“Lot more expensive than not buying quite enough lamps to light a whole inn,” Eryn shrugged. “Anyway, they only turned up tonight, and didn’t you say Mimics lie in wait? Rather than hike around?”  
  
“Usually, yes,” he said with a slight smile. “But that is not always the case. I remember very clearly the very first Mimic attack I ever encountered.  
  
“I was guiding a cleric through the catacombs underneath a ruined, abandoned temple. Over the centuries, it had been home to Goblins, Kobolds, wizards cast out of society for great evils committed - there was no telling what we would encounter.  
  
“Ahead of us, I heard screams - unmistakable, an ambush had befallen others less cautious than ourselves, exploring the dungeon ahead of us. I rushed to their aid but I was too late. The door to the chamber where it happened was open, and all that was left was one of their bodies. I recognised the markings left by the attacker, it bore the distinctive trademarks of a Mimic’s pseudopod.”  
  
“Its what?”  
  
“Oh they don’t just strike with teeth,” the Elf said, eyes wide. “First they form a club, an appendage of extruded flesh, and with that they strike you down, and hold fast to your very skin so you can’t escape. Never touch a potential Mimic, or you won’t let go alive,” he said sharply. “That’s why I’m never without this.” He tugged on the cloak he was sitting on. “Easily discarded should a Mimic latch on to it. Anything I don’t know for certain isn’t a Mimic, I touch through this, never with bare skin – even gloves, you won’t get them off before it’s up to your wrist.”  
  
“And that works?”  
  
“This is my second cloak.”  
  
“So your first actually saved you from a Mimic?”  
  
“No,” he said, raising a finger. “My first I had reason to believe was itself a Mimic.”  
  
“What reason?”  
  
“It felt strange against my skin, not like true wool, and my rations I kept in the pocket of it were eaten one day.”  
  
“Well,” Eryn said, looking impressed. “A close call, then?”  
  
“It turns out not,” he said, shaking his head. “My travelling companion was hungry while I slept. And it transpired to have been made from cotton, which explained the texture.”  
  
Eryn raised an eyebrow at him again. “I suppose it would.”  
  
“Indeed,” he said softly. He furrowed his brow. “Where was I again?”  
  
“With a priest in some tunnels.”  
  
“Ah yes.” He nodded. “With the remains of a Mimic attack. One body was half-eaten by the monster, the other, all that was left was his shoes and... this.” He pulled out a chain from inside his tabard.  
  
On the chain hung an enamelled cameo, depicting a person not blessed with beauty.  
  
“The original chain was broken in the attack. I don’t suspect this was worn for the aesthetics it gives,” he said, putting it down against his chest. “So I suspect it was a person close to the wearer. It isn’t the face of the body we found nearby. But I’ve never found them; never been able to tell them how their friend, maybe their lover, fell.”  
  
“And the Mimic?”  
  
“Gone,” he said ominously. “Straight out of the door, disappeared into the tunnels. I searched the place for it with no luck. That day’s always haunted me… The amount of stones unturned. Each door I walked through, each rat we passed, the very walls themselves - I spared an abhorrent creature that day through my simple ignorance.  
  
“So I have dedicated my life to their extinction,” he said proudly. “Only once the vile beasts have been wiped from the surface of the world will I know they have paid for their existence.”  
  
“Well that’s… certainly a goal,” Eryn said. The two looked at each other in awkward silence for a while. “So… can I help you?”  
  
His eyes lit up. “You would join my mission?”  
  
“No, I mean would you like a drink?”  
  
“Oh.” His face fell a little. “Of course, sorry. A pint of something light, please.”  
  
He sat in blissful silence as Eryn poured out a pint of the blonde for him. He laid down a few coins on the bar and took his drink to skulk around the room, glaring at the furniture, his free hand hidden under his cloak.  
  
Rikker watched him go with a suspicious look.  
  
“You know,” he said, turning to his brothers, “I swear that necklace of his just winked at me.”


	11. Forged in Flame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This character's outright stolen from a player in the game I GM so I take little credit for swiping her character idea and throwing her into my pub.  
>   
> Even down to the ending. She raised the question, I let her roll for it, and she rolled poorly.  
>   
> I'm going to be spending this weekend dancing, drinking and playing board games so if I don't manage to post tomorrow I just want you to know it's entirely my own fault.

The fire crackled and spat in the hearth, tongues of flame curling up from the wood and reaching for the chimney, in turn breaking free from the orange body of the flame then curling up in the air, a ghost of smoke scattering from where they died.  
  
The crackling picked up; the fire moved and swayed as it had each time the door had opened, and Dalkinic looked from the fire which was warming his feet, propped up on his bucket, to see who was appearing now, but the door was shut. There was no chill breeze being drawn up the chimney by the heat of the fire – rather, it had grown warmer. Red tendrils lashed out at his feet, forcing him to pull them up away from the fire.  
  
Under the crackle of the wood splitting there was a shrill whistle. Slowly, it grew, and people around began to turn to it. The whistle swelled to a scream, drowning out all other sounds in the room, and Dalkinic dived from his chair, swinging the bucket around the side of the chair and over his head, hunkering himself down safely beneath the protective metal, and lifted the lip of it just enough to see a sliver of light; he watched the scurry of feet as others near the fire abandoned their tables in panic, as the stones around the fire began to glow red, the heart of the fire pulsating white.  
  
The fire erupted in a bright flash, its reflection lighting up the inside of the bucket; the slit of view Dalkinic had made himself left a burned-out line of stars in his vision, and the metal his hand was pressed to so as to hold it up suddenly became too hot to touch, and he dropped it, leaving him in complete darkness but for the stars which prickled his eyes.  
  
The screaming and the roaring of the fire stopped suddenly and he heard a thud outside the bucket, felt the ground twitch, as something hit the floor before the fire hard. He kicked the bucket off, avoiding it touching his skin again.  
  
The chairs nearest the fire were singed and blackened, some knocked over onto their backs, the cushions still glowing at the edges with embers. The edges of the stones in the fire surround were cracked and discoloured black and pink from the shock of the heat, and the metal grille at the bottom had buckled. Soot was scattered across the floor and thick, hot black smoke hung like fog in the air, dispersing and settling slowly. Lying flat to the ground in the middle of all the soot was a woman with flame-red skin, scored with whorls and streaks of yellow, which flickered and glowed with their own light, an ember of light blinking whenever a mote of soot landed on them. Her hair stood up from her scalp, every move of her head causing it to twitch like the tongues of flame which now meandered calmly in the fireplace, oblivious of the destruction and chaos wrought around it as though nothing amiss had happened.  
  
A voice from some safe distance from the fire said in a loud whisper, “Where in the nine hells did she come from?”  
  
Her head snapped up to lock her eyes on the source of the question; the people between her and the speaker parted to escape her gaze, and he shrank back.  
  
“If I were to hazard a guess,” Dalkinic said slowly and calmly, “I’d say the elemental plane of fire.”  
  
She turned her head sharply to look at him. For a second, he thought the fire was reflecting brightly from her eyes, but the longer he looked, the more it appeared that the fire light was coming from within her.  
  
“I am right in assuming you’re a Genasi, aren’t I?”  
  
“How should I know?” she snapped. She pushed herself up to her feet and glared down at him. From the yellow patterns over her skin, flames erupted, spiralling around her. Dalkinic stepped back, driven by the surge of heat, and held a hand to shield his eyes from the glaring light.  
  
“Well… What do you call yourself, then?”  
  
She glared at him, agitated. The flames around her flickered uncertainly. “I don’t remember at the moment.”  
  
“You don’t remember what you are or you don’t remember who you are?”  
  
“Yes,” she barked.  
  
“All right,” Dalkinic said with a slow nod.  
  
The fire from her skin thinned out and she looked around herself, glaring at the silent faces and the eyes which bored into her.  
  
“Where am I?” She spun to Dalkinic and fixed him with burning eyes.  
  
“You’re at an inn.” He paused, waiting for a reaction, but none came. “Do you know the word?”  
  
“Of course I know what an inn is,” she yelled, a flash of fire surging from her scalp to the tips of her hair.  
  
“All right, that’s good,” Dalkinic said calmly.  
  
“Why have you brought me here?”  
  
Dalkinic narrowed his eyes at her. “Brought you here? You just popped out of the fireplace,” he said, pointing at the fire, the stones around it still glowing faintly. Her eyes followed his finger sceptically.  
  
“Well send me back,” she snapped.  
  
“Back where?”  
  
“Back where I came from!”  
  
Dalkinic shrugged emphatically and shook his head. “Even if I knew where that was, that’s well beyond me,” he said apologetically. “If my guess was right, which it may not be given that you’re familiar with inns which are somewhat lacking on the elemental planes, that would still be a whole plane of existence to be going at, and if I were wrong, as now appears likely, then any success in sending you there wouldn’t help anyone.”  
  
She calmed down a little, but still smouldered, literally as well as figuratively; the wood beneath her feet was darkening from the heat she was still giving off.  
  
“All right,” Dalkinic started again, pulling himself back into his seat. “Let’s start with what you do know. What was on the other side of that fire.”  
  
She scoffed. “Well, until about a minute ago I was.”  
  
“What was there with you?”  
  
She closed her eyes. “A dark room. Dark before the fire happened and I got spat out in here,” she said glumly.  
  
“Good, that’s very useful,” Dalkinic said cheerfully. “We can certainly rule out a few options with that if nothing more.”  
  
“Bare stone floors, bare walls but… There were books there…”  
  
Diana piped up at the mention of books. “What kind of books were they?”  
  
The Genasi shook her head angrily. “I’m not sure. But I don’t think they were for reading, somehow. More like they were for using. They were more like tools than books.”  
  
“So, spellbooks?” Diana suggested  
  
“Maybe?”  
  
Diana held up one of her books, showing a circular diagram which filled a page.  
  
“Like this?”  
  
“Yes!” She bound closer to look at the book. “I mean not exactly that, of course, but yes – less with the circles and more with triangles.  
  
“Hold on…” Diana frowned with dawning realisation. She sat down again, pulling a different book out of the pile and flicking through the pages. “Here,” she said eventually, hefting the book up to show the Genasi again. “Does this look more familiar?”  
  
She squinted at it. “Yes – yes, I remember this…”  
  
Diana smiled in astonishment. “Lucinda?”  
  
“I know that name,” the Genasi said wide-eyed.  
  
“Lucinda Quinn!”  
  
“Yes,” she gasped. “I know that name! You know who I am?”  
  
“Yes! Well,” Diana faltered, “I know who you were.”  
  
“What do you mean who I was?”  
  
“Well, from what I’ve heard you weren’t a Genasi at the time so that’s new, but…” Diana looked down a little embarrassed. “Your name’s part of the safety lectures every year at the college.”  
  
“A magical college?”  
  
“Yes, the Mages’ College,” Diana clarified.  
  
“What did I do to deserve that?”  
  
Diana hesitated and blushed. “Well, you’re given as an example of why not to conduct unapproved or unsupervised research.”  
  
“Oh,” Lucinda said shortly. “I take it whatever experiment I was running didn’t go smoothly.”  
  
“You… you burned down the old college building.”  
  
“No, then.” There was an awkward silence. “When was this?”  
  
“About a hundred years ago,” she said apologetically.  
  
Lucinda looked down awkwardly now.  
  
“Well sorry about that I guess.”  
  
“No it’s all right,” Diana said quickly, “They rebuilt before I was born.”  
  
“Of course they would have done.” She paused again. “That’s quite a long time. What did I do to burn it down?”  
  
“Apparently you opened a portal to the elemental plane of fire in the library.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Dalkinic shrugged triumphantly. “So in a roundabout way I was right after all.”  
  
The two looked down at him sharply. There’s a first time for everything, Diana thought, but she bit her tongue.  
  
Lucinda turned back to Diana, ignoring the cleric’s interjection. “That sounds inadvisable,” she said warily.  
  
“In an attempt to find a way to channel the power from it yourself.”  
  
“Oh, that makes sense,” she nodded. “That does sound tempting now you mention it.”  
  
“I guess it worked out a little bit given, well, the fact you’re a Genasi now.”  
  
“Yes…” Lucinda looked thoughtfully at her hands. She lifted one up over her head and a flame raced from her shoulder to her fingertip, dancing like a candle in the breeze. “Yes I dare say I may have been right about this. Maybe if my students could see me now…”  
  
“Erm – you didn’t have students.”  
  
The fire winked out. “Sorry?”  
  
“You were a student,” Diana said with a shrug. “You hadn’t been in the college for a whole year by then.”  
  
“Oh.” She pursed her lips dejectedly.  
  
“Well,” Dalkinic said brightly, clapping his hands. “If we’re all done with introductions and catching up on admittedly very old times, shall we look to the other pressing matter at hand?”  
  
Lucinda turned and glared at him again. He just looked her in the eyes with a smile.  
  
“Put some clothes on.”


	12. Hilt and Foil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little shorter and quite a lot later than usual because of being away this weekend, but this is an idea I really want the chance to play at some point. This is another look at warlocks, the terms and conditions of their pacts and the effects of them, this time looking at the Hexblade.

The door opened slowly, and through it stepped a tall figure in dark armour. The spark in his eyes was dim and distant, and his expression cold and unmoving. He pushed it closed, looking slowly around the room, and walked across to the bar with a grace that made those watching feel uneasy.  
  
All the while, he had his right hand loosely wrapped around the hilt of a sword at its side, a gemstone in the pommel glittering red and purple as the firelight passed through it.  
  
He stopped sharply at the bar, looking around.  
  
Eryn stood at the other side of the bar, watching him uncomfortably. His gaze floated slowly towards her, and he gave her what he probably thought resembled a smile.  
  
It looked more like a confirmation that he had a skull.  
  
“Good day,” he said flatly. His voice was cold and dark, like a whisper spoken in an empty room.  
  
Eryn put on a smile for him. “Good evening luv, what can I get for you?”  
  
“A drink please.” There was an unsettling silence.  
  
“Anything in particular?”  
  
“I don’t think so,” he said.  
  
“Of course.” She wandered down to the other end of the bar to get a glass; there were glasses nearer but it was another few seconds when she didn’t have to look at those dead eyes.  
  
The Unarmed Man had never been an establishment to judge its clientele for what they were, and had had more than the average inn’s share of undead over the years, shades and vampires seeking to redeem themselves, re-integrate into society, in the case of some vampires on the track of whoever turned them. None of them, without a living pulse between them, showed as little life as the living, breathing man across the bar, his hand still on that sword.  
  
The pommel glinted with the light she expected to find in his eyes as the fire twitched and settled from the cold wind which entered with him.  
  
She came back to him with a glass full of dark wheat beer and pushed it across to him.  
  
“Four copper pieces, please.” With the hand not on the sword, he pulled out a purse, put it on the bar, and counted out four coins, pulling it taut again and returning it to the inner pocket from which he drew it. His other hand never moved, never left the sword.  
  
“That would be easier with two hands,” she said.  
  
“Oh, I only have one spare,” he said, picking up the beer and sipping it delicately.  
  
She looked down his arm and back up to his eyes with a frown. “What do you mean spare?”  
  
“I can’t let go of my right hand.”  
  
“Do you mean with your right hand?”  
  
“No, of,” he said simply and sharply. “It has to stay on my hilt.”  
  
Eryn blinked at him. “That’s what I mean, let go of your sword with your hand.”  
  
“No, you don’t understand me,” he said. He drew the sword and she took a step back. He held it up, pommel aloft, towards her. “This is me.”  
  
“What do you mean that’s you? That’s a part of you?”  
  
“This is all of me, loosely speaking. The face to which you are speaking is merely borrowed.”  
  
She looked from the sword to his eyes with a look of astonishment. “How do you borrow a face?”  
  
“He picked me up, I pushed his mind aside so I could use his body.” He slid the blade back into its scabbard, slowly and deliberately. “If I let go, then control over this body will return to him.”  
  
“Only until he picks you up again,” she said to the hilt; somehow it was less unnerving to hold eye contact with an inanimate crystal than the eyes looking at her.  
  
“He is well aware of what I did the last time he laid hand on my hilt; in my experience, when one knows that, they often become less than willing to repeat the experience.”  
  
“You’ve had other…” Eryn couldn’t find an appropriate word.  
  
“Bearers, carriers, yes,” he said. “I have had willing companions with shared goals, whom I have protected with their own muscles. I have crossed battlefields passing from hand to hand as an unseen combatant amongst ranks of foes. I have passed unnoticed beyond guarded gates and keeps by presenting them a familiar face. I have held prisoners whom I have occupied the bones of to prevent them from acting under their own devices. This man is the latter; I apologise for bringing such a person into your inn but he is present in body alone.”  
  
“As long as you don’t let go,” Eryn said.  
  
“Precisely.” He followed her gaze to the sword hilt. “I can’t see through that, you know. To all intents and purposes, these are my eyes.”  
  
She looked up again, trying to hold his gaze.  
  
“So… What are you?”  
  
“Currently, I am a large, formerly belligerent man,” he said, and took another shallow sip of beer.  
  
“But generally?”  
  
“That is a difficult question,” he said, even more slowly than usual. “I was a young ruffian who found a sword, and I was the sword, forged from the very fabric hewn from the Shadowfell, found by some unwitting fool. I have no recollection before that point when seen by the sword, but the memory of the one who picked the sword up is clear, but from this point where one began and the other ended became fluid. There was power to the sword, power not of this world. The fool grew wiser and the sword grew stronger as we grew together.  
  
“As the bearer, I bound my soul to the sword; as the sword, I granted my power to the bearer. I fell in battle, but I did not move beyond this plane; no afterlife awaited me, but still my mind persisted. I saw nothing, not even darkness; heard nothing, a silence my living mind could not comprehend. I fell in pain, into the inability to feel relief. For what may have been months and may have been years, with no way to tell the passage of time, I hung in that void.”  
  
He paused, staring into the middle distance, for a little too long for comfort. Eryn began to wonder if he was still in the room with her.  
  
“Suddenly I was pulled back to this world. I could hear voices, I could feel the touch of cold steel in my hand, the familiar feeling of my hilt, more familiar to me than the hand holding it, lifting it from the ground. I looked around but did not see my old body.  
  
“I realised there was another voice in my head, a wanderer thinking themselves lucky for finding such a weapon so far from civilisation. It was a feeling of luck we shared, I in finding light after so long suspended in nowhere.  
  
“I talked with this person. Through them, I talked with their companions. I passed from hand to hand, mind to mind, along their journey, an intangible companion.  
  
“But my time with them was not long. A run-in with the law saw their weapons confiscated, myself among them. I left the jail in the hands of a guard on his way home from his duty and sold myself to an armoury; let the store-holder place me on a rack for sale until someone came to take me back to the world, a young boy with desires to learn to be a wizard, seeking something with which to protect himself on his journey, and I guarded him with his own hands.  
  
“Such has been my existence since that time. From one hand to another I have wandered a path paved with other people. A sword carrying a person carrying the sword.”  
  
Eryn leaned back, eyes narrowed. “So did you find what happened to your first body.”  
  
“Not yet,” he said, taking another sip. “But I believe there’s a high chance that I will some day.”  
  
Eryn’s eyed glinted with intrigue. “Oh? And what makes you think that?”  
  
“Because I was able to find how long I had been locked out of the world after my first body died. Not years, not months, it may not even have been a day; piecing together broken memories, divided as they are by the emptiness between being wielded, there is barely a week I cannot account for, within which time I hung on the wall of an armoury for I do not know how long.  
  
So years after it had happened, after I first knew death, I returned to the spot where first I fell, where my body had crumpled, where my sword had slid down a bank to a road below where my next bearers may already have been approaching. I followed the path my killers came down, to a town where they were known and eventually, I was able to track down the person who killed me.”  
  
Eryn stepped back a little. “And what did you do when you found them?”  
  
He smiled. Not the dead, mechanical smile from earlier, but a thoroughly wicked grin. His eyes twinkled for the first time.  
  
“Oh, I’m not done with him yet.”


	13. Roar of the North Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barbarians are often pinned as savage, frenzied and - well, barbaric. The totem barbarian puts a different spin on this, with the rage being the channelling of some form of beast the barbarian has bound themselves to. All the book lists are bears, wolves and eagles, but even it acknowledges that these archetypes can be re-flavoured for other animals. This got me thinking about Dragonborn and their pride in their Draconic lineage.

The door opened wide with a resounding thud and the wail of the wind outside, heavy with snow, which bore gusts to race around the inn, tugging at coats and menacing the fire to retreat; the light from within the inn glimmered off row upon row of metallic scales of armour which hung like icicles on a frozen waterfall, the steel shards blending seamlessly into the Dragonborn wearer’s own silver hide. She ducked her head down below the lintel as she entered, each step falling with heavy purpose, the click of her claws on the ground like crackling ice, then pulled herself up to her full height once more. She turned to close the door firmly behind her, and as she did a sheen of light from the fire raced the length of the broad blade which hung unsheathed down her back from a black leather baldric, the glittering ray picking out the intricate engravings which ran either side of the fuller, down one side an inscription in Draconic, down the other the scene of a great battle which played out from guard to tip. She wore no cloak against the winter wind which roared around the inn, the bare metal of her armour flush against her skin.  
  
A Dragonborn turned heads wherever they went, not merely an uncommon sight outside their homelands but imposing and frightening by their very nature. She lifted her head high and turned slowly; the cold wind which had ceased as the door closed felt to return wherever her ice white eyes fell, and people who felt themselves caught in her gaze pulled their coats and cloaks tighter against their shivers.  
  
She strode across to the bar, white snow from the road left in the tread of her unshod talons, where it stayed without melting after she had passed.  
  
She stopped at the bar, towering over Eryn with a stoic gaze.  
  
“Good evening,” Eryn said perkily, undaunted.  
  
“And to you.” Her voice carried a rumble like a distant avalanche, rattling glasses on the shelf behind Eryn, carried on cold breath which crystallised in the air, a thin mist around her mouth and nostrils.  
  
Eryn shivered but smiled. “Getting a bit cold out now, isn’t it?”  
  
“Indeed,” the Dragonborn smiled. “Most pleasant.”  
  
“Something to warm you up?” Eryn suggested.  
  
The Dragonborn frowned slightly at the offer. “No, thank you. Something light and cool, though.”  
  
“Of course.” Eryn filled up a pint glass and placed it down on the bar. “Four copper pieces, please.”  
  
The Dragonborn reached down for the glass and her hand nearly went around it. With her other, she dropped the coins into Eryn’s hand. The small copper discs looked like dust beside her long claws.  
  
“So,” Eryn said, rubbing her hands together for warmth as the Dragonborn raised her glass. “Have you come far tonight?”  
  
She put down the glass again, now empty. Around the brim was a jagged white line of crystals.  
  
“My clan lives up in the mountains,” she said with pride. “Looking out above the tops of the last trees to brave the ice, where the snow will last out the longest summers; where hills of ice roll from the peaks and their calves bear rivers, where the summer sun shines on the clouds below us and to our eyes plains of snow reach from horizon to horizon, a tundra that only the wings of a dragon may tread.”  
  
Eryn quietly poured herself a brandy and wrapped an arm around her chest.  
  
“So what brings you south of the tree line, then?”  
  
The Dragonborn thought for a moment, looking up with narrow eyes.  
  
“Complacency,” she said at length. “As a paladin is not content to accept righteousness in her own church, so I owe it to my bloodline that our ancestors’ names are not lost on the north wind. I bear their spirits with me in my heart, as I bear their histories on my sword.”  
  
So saying, she brought the great blade over her shoulder, mere inches from the ceiling as she spread her arms; the figures in battle swung and parried in the dancing light, flames erupting and dying as the etching progressed, ending once more on the slopes of a mountain, the tip of the blade glinting like a snow capped pinnacle in the winter sun. The cross-guard was intricately curled into the form of leathery wings, which bent back around her clawed hand, the pommel a dragon’s head on a swan neck which extended down the hilt.  
  
“What’s the story being told there?” Eryn asked, peering at the carving before her.  
  
“That I do not know,” said the Dragonborn, heaving the sword back over her shoulder again and fixing its clasp to hold it in place. “If it is a history, it is one lost to our clan; if it is a legend, it is one not told in any other source; if it is a prophecy, then it has not yet come to pass. My wish is that it will be the latter of these, that by the spirit of my ancestors who forged this, I can bring it to become all three of these, that I will be the one to starve the fires of destruction.”  
  
“Fire isn’t always destructive,” Eryn said defensively. She caught the eye of the Genasi, who was listening with some discomfort from the fireplace. “It gives us warmth and light, isn’t that a good thing?”  
  
“You say it is not always destructive, how is this? Have you ever known a fire which did not consume? Which comes to be, grants its warmth and light and then leaves like the sun at dusk without leaving behind its scars? Then what becomes of the wood placed upon it, what is its fate? Would you stand in the lame to celebrate its warmth, set fire to a book so that you may read it by night? The flame exists solely by the destruction of its host, and it craves yet more destruction. Only when there is nothing left to consume will the fire die of its own accord, and only when it is contained, bounded by metal and stone that it cannot consume, can it be bent to our will. Nothing of nature can enter the fire and emerge unchanged; even that which emerges stronger does so only at the expense of the destruction of that which made it weak before. In ice all things are preserved: those who die by fire leave nothing but ash, those who fall in ice remain, their faces not left to our memories and lost to this world. Ice does not decay when all is frozen, as fire when all is burned.”  
  
“So the sword is telling a story about something or someone protecting the lowlands from fire that would otherwise destroy them? Or otherwise already would have?”  
  
“That I am afraid I do not know. It is not known to us whether the fire is literal, a true flame, or that which brings one, or if it is symbolic. The story itself may be nothing but metaphor: some scholars believe the flame to be a rage within us which must be controlled, and that it is not a thing to be defeated, but that it is to be used, to be brought forth in times of need, a harnessed, purging flame.”  
  
“Well what does the inscription on the other half say? Is that any help?”  
  
“Loosely translated, it means the roar of the north wind,” she said, lifting her head with pride. “The voice of my home, the call of my clan, the breath of my bloodline, the echoes of my heritage, the first sound to grace my ear as a hatchling. The wind does not sit idly on its haunches stirring impotently in the tundra and the mountains, and leave the lowlands to bake in the sun’s harsh rays: it soars undaunted to bear forth the snows of winter. As the dragons from whose brood our clan emerged brought the ice with them by their breath and by their magic, to quell, to subdue, to preserve, so I must descend to sound that same roar.” She let out a thin white mist from her nostrils which sparkled in the air. “But it says no more than that; the roar may be a harbinger of the events yet to pass, it may be the triumphant fanfare left behind from legends already come to pass, it may be an epithet, a title for the one to bring to pass such events, or to heed the message contained, to harness the destructive force within themselves.”  
  
Eryn smiled a little. “You sound excited by that last option.”  
  
The Dragonborn grinned, razor sharp fangs like shards of ice on the surface of a lake glimmering white. “I am the first to bear this sword out of my clan’s home. The first to shoulder the weight of my ancestors, to wield their spirits. I was the first they chose worthy to feel the true might which courses through this blade, to call upon their might.”  
  
“So if it is a prophecy, you’re in with a good shout?”  
  
“A Dragonborn does not merely shout,” she said with a laugh in her voice; the glasses behind Eryn rattled again. “She roars.”  
  
There was another rattle, but Eryn realised that this time it was her teeth. She took a warming sip of brandy and pointed at the Dragonborn’s glass.  
  
“Can I get you another one of those?”  
  
The Dragonborn nodded gratefully and counted out another few coins; they fell like snowflakes from her claws as she handed them over, stooping to lift her glass again.  
  
“You know,” said Eryn, “I think you’re right.”  
  
She finished the beer and placed the empty glass back on the bar softly. “Right about what, exactly?”  
  
“The prophecy and the rage,” Eryn smiled. “Taking something destructive and controlling it.”  
  
The Dragonborn narrowed her eyes and her lips curled into a smile. “And why do you say that?”  
  
“Because there’s a fire in you.”


	14. Monk see, monk do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a character I really planned for fourth edition after reading up on the art of zui-gun, where it has some nice synergy; it's a little less interesting in 5e but I quite like the character. However, there's not been much time to write today so it's another surprisingly short and late one.

The space between the door and the bar was beginning to fill up as space at the tables ran out. The door opened a little and closed but from the bar no-one could be seen to enter.  
  
Between the heads and shoulders of the revellers, Eryn could see the end of a staff. It turned and swayed as though looking around, then vanished, popping up again some way to the side. Through ducking, swaying and weaving, turning and whirling, it meandered erratically between people seemingly unnoticed.  
  
Finally, it came to rest against the bar. With a shuffling sound, a Halfling shimmied up the staff until he was level with the bar, and eased himself back from the staff into a bar stool, where he sat, bare feet pressed together, swaying forward to lean on the staff again with a grin.  
  
His curly black hair was held up in a bun atop his head, a goatee on his chin trimmed to a point, its upward curl following his smile. He wore a simple beige gi, with a looping pattern of monkeys looping around the trim; at his belt was clasped a corked, engraved jade bottle.  
  
“Busy night,” he said with a slight slur.  
  
“Tends to be when there’s a job opening,” Eryn smiled. “What can I get for you?”  
  
“Just water, please.”  
  
Eryn had never known plain water be so popular. She filled up a glass and slid it over the bar.  
  
“Sobering up so soon?” she said as he swayed forward to pick it up.  
  
“Sobering up?” He laughed. “No, I don’t touch alcohol.”  
  
Eryn raised an eyebrow at him.  
  
“A drunkard moves unpredictably, even to themselves,” he said with a wry smile, uncorking his bottle. The engraving depicted a monkey tumbling from a tree. “There’s no advantage in knowing yourself as little as everybody else does.”  
  
He began pouring from the glass into the narrow neck of the bottle. As he put the empty glass back on the bar, someone passing behind him who was less enamoured with the notion of drunkenness having no advantage sloshed sideways into his barstool. The bottle dropped from his hand and he fell backwards off the side of the chair, knocking his staff over. With his feet hooked on the unsteady chair, he caught the bottle inches from the floor in one hand and with the other caught himself on the staff, using it as a lever to swing himself back onto the stool.  
  
He whistled with relief and put the cork back in the bottle, all without spilling a drop.  
  
“That looked close,” Eryn said, impressed. She gestured toward the bottle with her head as she picked up the empty glass. “Looks hard to replace.”  
  
“Impossible, in a way,” he said, fixing it back to his belt. “I would fail my pilgrimage.”  
  
“How so?”  
  
“I am an acolyte of the Order of the Monkey,” he said. “I am on my journey to become initiated fully into the order, and this bottle is part of that mission.”  
  
“How so?”  
  
“The bottle is filled before an acolyte leaves,” he said. “It will hold enough water to comfortably last a week, and the acolyte is permitted only to drink from the bottle. When the bottle is empty, they must return. Three times, I have made this journey, the bottle has run empty and I have returned to the monastery in shame in under a month, forgetting the lesson the journey is to teach.”  
  
“The lesson being?”  
  
“The monkey which fills its cheeks with fruit from the tree may travel for miles. But the monkey who leaves with nothing and eats from each tree it passes may circle the world and never hunger.”  
  
Eryn smiled. “You mean you can fill up the bottle.”  
  
He shrugged. “In short, yes. Seems obvious with hindsight. But I have been travelling a year with that lesson.”  
  
“So when can you return?”  
  
“There are other lessons to be learned in the world,” he said.  
  
“Like what?”  
  
He laughed. “If I knew that, I would be back in the monastery now. If an acolyte does not return to the mountains parched and broken within a month of leaving the monastery, it is common that they will not return.”  
  
“Then why does the monastery exist, if its main lesson is to leave?”  
  
The Halfling took a sip from his bottle. “Years gone by, a monk from the town at the foot of the mountain left the people behind him and made his home amongst the monkeys who live in the forests, as the monkeys often venture from their trees to live on the outskirts of the town among people. He shared fruit with them which fell ripe from the trees and he watched them after they ate, when the alcohol in the fruit began to intoxicate them, and though he had sparred with many a fighter before and could tell any opponent’s next move, he could not predict what the monkeys would do next.  
  
“Others came to study with him. They built a monastery beyond the trees, where the monkeys live with the monks who study there, and share their fruit and wine.”  
  
“Hold on, I thought you said you didn’t drink any alcohol?”  
  
“Not outside of the monastery,” he said with a sad smile.  
  
“If you miss it, why did you leave?”  
  
“The monkey which climbs to the top of its tree can climb no higher. To reach greater heights, it must first descend, and begin its journey at the roots of a taller tree. When the monkey is young, it rides on its mother’s back, and it learns what the top of the tree is, but not how to reach it. Then, it learns to climb by itself, and if it falls then it falls but it never stops its climbing because it has fallen too many times; when it grows older, it leaves the ones who taught it.”  
  
“Does all your wisdom come from monkeys?” Eryn said with a lopsided smile.  
  
The Halfling grinned back. “Does all yours come from people? People who learn all they know from other people will only ever learn that which is already known to people. Monkeys make great teachers, as they do not know that we do not know what they know. They simply go about their lives, and we ours, and we learn from one another by what we do, and what we see.”  
  
“Monkey see,” Eryn began with a smile.  
  
“Monk do,” the Halfling finished with a smile. He took another sip from his bottle. “But as you say, you cannot get all your knowledge from monkeys and that is why I wander. Now I am learning from people, people who have learned nothing from monkeys. And now, it is people who do not know what I do not know.”  
  
“So why do you act drunk? Do you fight like that?”  
  
“The masters from whom we learn to fight are the masters from whom we learn to make wine,” he said cheerfully. “And the masters from whom they learned were drunk on fruit from the trees. What you can predict, you cannot learn from, as by seeing it coming you have already learned it once.”  
  
Eryn shrugged and nodded. “So once you can predict that, they send you out into the wide world with a bottle of water to find what else you can predict?”  
  
“Water?” he laughed. “The bottle was filled with wine and the last time I left I had learned the lesson and drank the whole thing in one night.”  
  
Eryn narrowed her eyes at him. “So the real reason you don’t return to the monastery…”  
  
He nodded. “I woke up the next day on a boat haven’t the foggiest idea where I am any more.”


	15. Lucky Charm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorcerers don't learn their magic through study, they don't buy it with pacts and they don't receive it for any dedication to a higher power, they just get it. I got to wondering, how long could you have magic powers without realising?

A cheerful face appeared at the window in the door, ringed with wild, windswept hair, looking side to side before opening the door. The man to whom the face belonged opened the door just enough to enter and slid through with an apologetic smile.  
  
He looked around for a way through the crowd to the bar and ducked sideways into the crowd, momentarily lost from sight. He appeared again, far from where he had started, waving aside snow-speckled mist which had followed him through the crowd.  
Clear of the throng, he gave Eryn a smile of relief and hopped up onto a bar stool.  
  
“Good eve- oops…” As he swung himself up onto the stool, his elbow caught an empty glass placed precariously near the edge, and it tumbled to the floor, shattering with a loud crackle.  
  
“So sorry, I’ll get that,” he said, hopping down from the stool again. He stood up an intact glass in his hand.  
  
Eryn smiled as she took it back. “Well mended,” she said, putting it aside out of harm’s way.  
  
“Oh, no, it didn’t break,” he said, shaking his head. “Sometimes they just sound like they’ve broken but they’re actually fine.”  
  
“Right…” Eryn raised her eyebrow. As someone who’d grown up with the sound of breaking glass, from the sound of it shattering she could very nearly tell how many pieces it had broken into, and that number was never one.  
  
There was a slurred shout from the corner of the room. The man at the bar and Eryn both turned to see a large, swaying man yelling into the face of another drinker. Their argument was too diluted by drink to hear what had sparked it, but loud enough that other people were having to cover their ears from it to continue their own conversations.  
  
I do wish they wouldn’t do that when we have a contractor in, Eryn thought to herself.  
  
No sooner had she thought this than the two stopped, with perplexed expressions, and folded gently to the floor, fast asleep.  
  
The man turned back with a shrug. “Can I have a pint of whatever they weren’t having, please?”  
  
Eryn stared at him. “Did you just put them to sleep?”  
  
“How?” he said, frowning. “I didn’t even touch them. Probably just can’t handle their drink. I see people do that a lot. Get rowdy then just pass out.” He shrugged again. “Do they not normally do that?”  
  
“No,” Eryn said with a scowl. “People don’t tend to just do that.”  
  
“Oh. Strange, I’ve seen it happen all the time.” He dug in a pocket for his wallet. “Well, like you said, it’s not a great time for them to go off on one like that.”  
  
Eryn recoiled. “Like I said?”  
  
“Like you said,” he repeated. “When there’s a contractor in.”  
  
Eryn shushed him urgently. “I never said that!”  
  
He looked confused and slightly hurt. “Well, I heard you,” he said. “You wished they wouldn’t when there was a – ”  
  
“Don’t call them that when there are… people coming looking for work,” Eryn whispered. “It breaks the air they’ve got going on.”  
  
He frowned at her. “Then why did you say it to me?”  
  
“I didn’t! I didn’t say anything out loud, I just thought it!”  
  
“Oh, people do that all the time,” the man said, shaking his head and smiling knowingly. “They don’t realise they’ve said something, it just sort of slips out ant they assume they just said it in their heads – most people don’t hear it most of the time but I always seem to catch it somehow, must just have good ears.”  
  
Eryn scowled at him. “What’s your game?”  
  
He blinked at her. “I… I don’t have one.”  
  
“What is it you’re doing?”  
  
He looked at the coins in his hand. “Buying a drink?”  
  
Eryn sighed. Maybe she had just said it out loud after all. She poured a glass of wheat beer and put it down in front of him.  
  
“Four copper, please.”  
  
He looked at the coins in his hand. “Can you change a silver? I only have three in copper so…”  
  
“Three will do,” she said cheerfully.  
  
He handed over the money with a smile and started drinking. Eryn started putting the coins away and her brow furrowed.  
  
“Hang on a minute,” she said sharply. “You just charmed me.”  
  
He smiled bashfully. “Oh – um… Thank you?”  
  
“No, I mean magically, you just charmed me into under-charging you.”  
  
“I never!” he spluttered.  
  
“Then why did I just undercharge you?”  
  
“I thought that was a normal thing,” he said, shrugging. “I get undercharged all the time, I figured I just make friends quickly.”  
  
“Friends,” Eryn echoed suspiciously.  
  
“Well, I mean I tend to get on well with people when we’ve just met,” he said. He took another drink from the glass of beer.  
  
“And why do you think that is?” Eryn put a hand on her hip.  
  
“Apparently I’m a lucky person to have around,” he said with a shrug.  
  
“Lucky?”  
  
“Well, I’m good at spotting things other people don’t,” he said thoughtfully. “People often say I find things which were literally invisible, but that’s not what literally means.”  
  
He laughed and put his glass down, not on the bar but just next to it. Regardless, it didn’t fall. Eryn stared pointedly at the glass and he followed her eyes with his.  
  
“Whoops,” he said, grabbing the glass and taking another drink from it. “See what I mean about lucky? Caught that just in time.”  
  
“Just in time before what?”  
  
“Before gravity caught it,” he said and took another drink.  
  
“That’s… that’s not how gravity works at all,” Eryn said.  
  
He shrugged. “I don’t know, things fall down sometimes, sometimes they don’t, I don’t know the science behind it.”  
  
“What do you mean sometimes they don’t? Things fall, that’s what gravity is.”  
  
“Well not everything,” he said with a shrug. “You know, like birds,”  
  
“All right,” Eryn conceded reluctantly.  
  
“… Things you just take your eyes off for a moment, clouds,”  
  
“Nope,” Eryn said, shaking her hand, “That’s not… You can’t just put those two together.”  
  
“Well I mean clouds fall eventually, I suppose,” he conceded, “That’s why it’s snowing now isn’t it? Like I said, I don’t really know the whole science behind it.”  
  
That, Eryn had to agree, was clear.  
  
“Let me guess,” she said, smiling a little. “This happens a lot for you but other people don’t see it as much.”  
  
“Exactly! Like I said, I’m a lucky person to have around.” He finished his drink and put the glass down, this time on the bar. “Can I have another pint of that?”  
  
“Of course,” Eryn said with a smirk, “But it will be four copper this time.”  
  
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a purse, drawing it open. “Oh,” he said apologetically, “That’s not my purse.”  
  
“Whose is it, then?”  
  
“Oh it’s mine,” he explained. “I just keep odds and ends in it.”  
  
“What kind of odds and ends?”  
  
“Occasionally I’ll see a flower or a stone or something that just stands out to me for some reason,” he said, putting it away again with a shrug. “So I keep them in here just in case I want them later.”  
  
“Want them later for what?”  
  
“I don’t really know,” he said. “For example, I saw a rose on the way here.” He pulled the pouch out. “I don’t know what it is about it but I just knew I had to have it.” He dug about in the pouch and sighed.  
  
“What’s wrong?”  
  
“Oh, it’s gone,” he said, putting the purse away again.  
  
“How, has someone stolen it?”  
  
“No, they just disappear after a while. Usually just when I remember them. I just remembered the rose earlier when those drunks started fighting for some reason.”  
  
Eryn narrowed her eyes. “Do you tend to think about roses when people pass out, by any chance?”  
  
He thought for a moment. “Funny you should mention that, actually, I suppose there is something quite calming and sleepy about roses, isn’t there. Well, the petals at least, the thorns I’ve never much thought about.”  
  
Eryn nodded. “Right.”  
  
“Anyway,” he said, this time producing his purse and handing over a silver coin.  
  
Eryn started filling up his glass again. “So,” she started. “How long have you been… lucky?”  
  
“As long as I can remember, really,” he said with a smile and a shrug. “I remember when I was little I’d climbed up the chimney of our house but when I tried to get down I lost my footing and fell onto the road, but was fine because a bush broke my fall.”  
“A bush in the road?”  
  
“No, the bush was nearby,” he said, “but if it hadn’t been I would have landed much harder.”  
  
“So you didn’t land in the bush?”  
  
“No, just near enough for it to slow me down,” he said.  
  
“You’ve never really paid much attention to gravity, have you?”  
  
“Not really; why?”  
  
“Never mind.”  
  
He took another slurp of beer. “I think I really started to think about it when I was a teenager. I think the idea of fate and balance really shaped how I went about life. I just started noticing how bad things seemed to happen to bad people around me.”  
  
“Oh?” Eryn stepped back a little.  
  
“I remember when the local bully was trying to threaten a friend of mine, I think he might have been shaking him down for money or something, and he just caught fire.”  
  
“How?” Eryn spat. “Was he anywhere near a fire at the time?”  
  
“No, I don’t think so, that’s why it really stood out to me. So I started thinking about my own luck, and how I didn’t want to end up like that, because I was quite an angry adolescent.”  
  
“Really.”  
  
“So I really focused on being a nicer person. I guess I must be doing something right because nice things have kept happening to me.” He put the beer down next to the bar again, staring vacantly into space.  
  
“Almost like magic, really,” Eryn said pointedly, glancing at the glass.  
  
“I suppose you could say that,” he said with a nod. He picked up the glass, had another drink from it and put it down on the bar. “Like I’m being followed around by my own personal wizard.”


	16. Twiddle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A really short chapter today, due to very little time writing and this idea only properly coming to me today, meaning I spent more time looking into what could be done with it than the actual writing. Long story short, rock gnomes are already well known for making little gizmos, and in "Plan Shift: Kaladesh", there's a feat to allow you to create little automata called Servos. It says very little about what they can and can't do.  
>   
> The character herself is based on another party member from the Pathfinder game Dalkinic's from, who was a wizard called Whibzi.

The crowd around the door began to thin out as more of the locals who came for the flowing drink returned to their homes, with the night growing late and the morning approaching. The door slid open once more, the wind outside now dying down but the night air no less cold. Under a pair of brass-rimmed goggles perched on her forehead was the face of a Gnome, plastered in soot from her chin to the tips of two bushy pigtails which stood up as though alert.  
  
She held the door open and was followed in by a metal orb the size of her head on four spindly legs, which skittered in onto the hard floor and shook a layer of snow off itself as she shut the door behind it.  
  
It bounded along behind her, the tiny points of its metal feet slipping on the snow-dampened floor and climbed the barstool next to her, sitting on the bar beside her.  
  
“Hi!” she said with a bright, beaming grin.  
  
“Good evening,” Eryn responded, looking at the contraption curling up on her bar. “What’s that?”  
  
“Oh, this is Twiddle,” she said, patting the top of the orb. “Say hi, Twiddle!”  
  
The thing whistled and wiggled a leg. Despite herself, Eryn waved back at it.  
  
“What can I get for you?”  
  
“Can I have some bread please?”  
  
“Certainly, anything to drink with that?”  
  
“Do you have any coffee?”  
  
Eryn glanced at the window; the stars were visible against the black night sky.  
  
“I’ll… get a brew on,” she said.  
  
“Thank you!” the Gnome called after Eryn as she disappeared into the back room. The orb next to her whistled the same cadence.  
  
Eryn emerged a few moments later carrying a plate with a roll of bread and a knife, and put it down on the bar.  
  
“Six copper once your coffee’s ready, please.”  
  
Twiddle stood up, drawing up to the fullest height its tiny legs would allow, and the Gnome placed her hand under it. One by one, six copper coins dropped out of the bottom of the contraption into her hand with a clink. After the sixth, it tucked its legs back under itself.  
  
“Now that’s clever,” Eryn laughed as the Gnome handed her coins over.  
  
Twiddle whistled happily as the Gnome started to cut the bread into thick slices. Once she had finished cutting it, she patted the metal creature on the top of its orb and two flaps flipped open to either side with a jiggle. She put the slices of bread into the top of its head and the flaps closed again.  
  
“Does it need feeding?”  
  
“Not exactly,” the gnome grinned.  
  
Eryn put the coins away and returned to the back room; when she came back to the bar, she had a tall ceramic cup of black coffee on a tray.  
  
As she placed it down on the bar, the flaps on the top of Twiddle sprang open again and the Gnome caught the two pieces of toast which had jumped out of the top, placing one back on the plate and taking a tiny bite out of the other.  
  
Eryn laughed as the Gnome put another two slices into its head and it hunkered down to toast these too.  
  
“Did you make that?”  
  
The Gnome looked at the piece of toast in her hand. “No, Twiddle did. I just cut it up.”  
  
“No, I mean Twiddle.”  
  
“Oh,” she beamed. “Yep. When I was little, my parents wouldn’t let me have a puppy.”  
  
When you were little, Eryn thought. She barely saw over the top of the bar.  
  
“So I decided to make my own.”  
  
“And here it is?”  
  
“No, Twiddle’s more than a puppy,” she said proudly. Twiddle whistled cheerily. “Also, the puppy fell apart, but I learned what I did wrong.”  
  
There was another springy pop, and the next two slices of toast leaped out of the top of Twiddle; the Gnome redirected them mid-air onto her plate with a flick of the slice in her hand and took a sip of the coffee with her other. It whistled again as it settled down.  
  
“Why does it whistle like that?”  
  
“Because it doesn’t want to talk,” the Gnome replied, cheerfully chomping away at her toast.  
  
“It can talk?”  
  
“Don’t have to,” it said. It spoke with the Gnome’s voice, albeit slightly tinny and echoed, almost as though coming out of a small metal sphere.  
  
“It can do more than that,” the Gnome added with a smile; she stroked one of its legs affectionately and the sound of a flute started to come from it. It was a simple tune, and it sounded like it was repeating a performance it had heard someone else play, errors and all. The Gnome took another sip of coffee and patted Twiddle again, and it stopped. She shook her hand in discomfort.  
  
“Twiddle, you’re really warm now,” she said. “Go out in the snow to cool down a bit.”  
  
It clambered down, scuttled across the floor and waited by the door for her to follow it over and let it out. As she opened the door, the cat Jennifer was standing outside waiting to be let back in. At the sight of Twiddle, her tail blew up like a squirrel’s and she flew off into the night.  
  
The gnome came back in to sit down and put her goggles on, revealing two patches where they had sat which were now bare of soot.  
  
“What are they for?”  
  
“So I can see what Twiddle sees,” she said, lifting them from her eyes again. “To make sure it doesn’t get into any trouble and when it wants to come back in again.”  
  
“What kind of trouble can it get into?”  
  
“Well that cat looked like she might be scary,” the Gnome said.  
  
“Oh that’s Jennifer, you don’t have to worry about her,” Eryn said reassuringly.  
  
The Gnome sighed, taking her goggled back off and putting them back on her forehead. “Maybe I don’t, but she just knocked Twiddle’s leg off.”


	17. Blood Oath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter should have gone up yesterday but due to sudden illness I can only describe as drunkenness (which is unnerving to say the least when you haven't touched any alcohol), the time I had set aside to write it was instead spent swaying groggily and avoiding things which made me feel queasy, like looking at a computer screen.  
>   
> I had a lot of fun with this idea, which came to me while reading the details of the Oath of Vengeance in the Players' Handbook. I'll say no more.

The lamplight shone across the white steel armour of the huge figure who pushed open the door; decorative banners hung down from his gorget and breastplate, deep red silk embroidered in silver but unadorned with the symbols of any church or guild. His face was almost hidden behind the visor of his helmet, only dark eyes set in olive skin visible amid the ring of steel.  
  
A path cleared before him with each step he took. He came to a stop at Riarden and Heian’s table, nearest to the door.  
  
To a career criminal, a large man in shining armour approaching your table is rarely a good sign. They looked up with sheepish smiles, as though they hadn’t seen him approaching.  
  
“Good evening, sir,” Riarden said as cheerfully as he could. “Can we help you?”  
  
“A good evening to you both,” he responded. He had a deep, almost growling but warm and cheerful voice. “I am new to this establishment, do you have any recommendations?”  
  
“Oh,” Heian sighed with relief. “Well, does a light, fruity blond tickle your fancy?”  
  
“Thank you,” he said politely, “but I’m really just looking for a drink.”  
  
Heian blinked a few times.  
  
Riarden held back a laugh. “There’s a Dwarven wheat beer that might be to your tastes.”  
  
“Thank you kindly.” He bowed his head to them. “And a good evening to you both.”  
  
Heian and Riarden exchanged a glance as he walked away.  
  
“Did you just proposition a paladin?” Riarden hissed with a grin.  
  
“I… Not knowingly.” Heian paused. “Was I just turned down by a paladin?”  
  
“It sounded like it.”  
  
The man in armour approached the bar, standing next to the bucket on which Dalkinic was perched to make his order. Dalkinic looked him up and down with a friendly smile.  
  
“I must ask,” he said cheerfully, “You have the bearing and appearance of a paladin, am I correct?”  
  
The huge man nodded, his helmet rocking back and forth with clanking and ringing. “Mine is a life sworn in oath, yes.”  
  
“Commonly a paladin bears the badge or symbol of their god or their order but I see none in your raiment. Your oath, was it not sworn in service of a god?”  
  
“Not precisely,” he said, a bellowing pride swelling in his voice. “It would be more true that my oath is against a god.”  
  
“Well,” Dalkinic smiled with intrigue. “This is something I’d much like to hear… come, sit with me by the fire.”

  
  


Dalkinic hopped up into his chair and dropped the bucket on the floor where his feet could reach to rest on it. His new companion folded himself into the chair opposite.  
  
“My name is Dalkinic,” he said, reaching out his hand. “I’m a cleric of sorts, though like yourself I align myself against religion rather than with it.”  
  
“Benedict,” the paladin said, extending a hand to shake Dalkinic’s upper body in general.  
  
“So,” Dalkinic began, taking a swig from his glass. “An oath against a god is an unusual thing. What was it that prompted this?”  
  
“The god in question is Gruumsh,” he responded, venom in his sonorous voice. “You know of him, I believe?”  
  
“The one-eyed god of the Orcs,” Dalkinic nodded. “He who watches, he who never sleeps, he who is really bad at winking and may or may not be the same person as Talos, depending on who you ask – funny things, gods.”  
  
“Indeed,” said the paladin. He pulled off his helmet and Dalkinic froze, nearly dropping his beer. From his jutting lower jaw, two prominent, sharp tusks curled over his upper lip, a clear mark of Orc heritage.  
  
“Very interesting,” Dalkinic muttered, trying not to stare at his incisors.  
  
Benedict placed the helmet gently on the ground. “Before I was born, my village was attacked, almost destroyed by a nearby Orcish war band.”  
  
“Around nine months before?” Dalkinic ventured.  
  
Benedict’s brow furrowed. “Around so long, yes. How did you know?”  
  
Dalkinic’s smile faded and his eyes narrowed. “Just a guess, I suppose. Carry on.”  
  
Benedict shrugged with a metallic squeak from his pauldrons and took a swig of his beer. “An order of paladins from a temple in the nearest city came to the village’s aid and drove out the Orcs, but it was too late for many. Even in my earliest memories, years after the attack, the paladins were still helping to put the village back together again. The number of homes standing empty was testament to the death left in their wake, though I would never see their faces.  
  
“As I grew older, it became clear that I was stronger than my peers. I stood taller than others my age, had the strength of a grown man while I was still a child. It led me to an epiphany.”  
  
“Ah,” Dalkinic said, with a nod.  
  
“You see my realisation,” Benedict said, and took another drink. “With the paladins still present in the town, I knew I had a calling, that I bore a purpose, that my strength was for a greater destiny.”  
  
Dalkinic pursed his lips. “Your realisation was that you would make a good paladin.”  
  
“Simply put, yes.” He took another drink of his beer. “You seem surprised.”  
  
“Increasingly not; go on.”  
  
“I left the village behind me before I was a man,” he continued. “For many who have walked such a path, this first step along it is the hardest but I did not feel the pull of home. I had made few friends as a child – even my own father and I rarely saw eye-to-eye, and he showed no sadness when I left. He always treated me as though I weren’t his child at all.”  
  
Dalkinic coughed into his beer.  
  
“I suppose I spent so long hanging around the paladins that he resented me learning more from them than I ever did from him.”  
  
“Yes, that… I can see that being something of a strain,” Dalkinic said.  
  
Benedict nodded sadly. “The paladins welcomed me in gladly. Many I had not met before had fought during the Orc insurgence. They must have been told of my coming, as without my having to tell them, they knew whence I had come.”  
  
“Very deductive of them indeed.” The Gnome had his eyes firmly fixed on the fire.  
  
“I took to my training quickly, but I never heard the call of their god. Instead, my dreams were haunted by the one-eyed one.”  
  
Dalkinic nodded sadly. “Orcs and their progeny are plagued by such hallucinations,” he said. “A powerful manifestation of ill feelings, you can see how it drives them to cruelty. These visions are part of the very nature of Orc blood.”  
  
“Indeed, but why would he appear to me of all people, one whose very life was marred by his influence?”  
  
Dalkinic shut his eyes and took in a deep breath. “Yes, that is unusual,” he forced himself to say.  
  
“Maybe not,” the paladin raised his glass to his eyes. “I came to realise it made perfect sense. My strength was not for their god.”  
  
Dalkinic opened an eye again. “No?” he said hopefully.  
  
“The very nature of my birth, in the wake of the Orc attack; my strength, to match the strength of an Orc; now this maddening voice which tortured my thoughts and called to me as one of his own, it can all only mean one thing.”  
  
Dalkinic breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “Well, I suppose so,” he said.  
  
“That my destiny does not lie in the service of their order, but in the destruction of the Orc race.”  
  
Dalkinic finished the rest of his beer. “Can you talk me through that logic?”  
  
“These visions, these manifestations of the one-eyed one,” he said, tapping a steel-clad finger to his temple; “They are sent to sway me from the path. To sow seeds of sympathy for the beasts who left my home in ruins in their wake, to try to turn me from the righteous path, he wishes to corrupt me, see me broken before him.” He smiled. “But it is merely desperation, and it is too little too late. The gods saw to give me might to rival his twisted creations, and he will not claim that might as his own.”  
  
Dalkinic looked at him with reluctant admiration. Other than the core nature of his very existence, Dalkinic couldn’t fault a word the Half-Orc had said.  
  
“So I left the order; I thanked them for their guidance throughout my life and I told them of my path. Many were surprised – after all, I had never seen an Orc myself at this point, nor had I told them of Gruumsh’s voice coming to me, although they seemed surprised at my loathing for the creatures. Even those who had helped defend and rebuild the village after the Orcs destroyed it seemed not to expect it. But they wished me well, and I went with their blessing. Not with their god nor their banner, but with their devotion in my heart, and I swore to no name but my own that I would see the end of the footsoldiers of Gruumsh walking this world.”  
  
“But that’s an entire species,” Dalkinic said. “You so firmly believe that no good can be made of someone simply by the nature of their birth to an Orc?”  
  
Benedict looked at him through narrow eyes. “Do you not? Do you believe that one of Gruumsh’s servants could resist their born purpose? You can imagine such a creature fighting for good, a monster’s might behind creation rather than destruction?”  
Dalkinic bit his tongue. “How long have you had the voice of Gruumsh in your head willing you to turn to his side?”  
  
Benedict sighed. “All my adult life.”  
  
“Then you know it is a call that can be resisted.”  
  
Benedict smiled a little. “You really think so? You think there is the potential for good in the hearts of one born of Orcs?”  
  
Dalkinic shrugged. “I just don’t think you should rule it out.”


	18. Épéiste Court

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've had a thing against dark, edgy rogues as long as I've been a D&D player, and I've been playing a rogue that whole time. So when the Swashbuckler subclass came out, I had only one thought.  
>   
> Julie d'Aubigny: La Maupin.  
>   
> If you don't know the name, look her up and have a wonderful time reading about her life, but I'd say read this pale imitation first, because if you read about the real her first and then this I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

The door swung open and a Halfling swaggered in, snow speckling the peacock feather which arched over her cap, perched on a nest of red curls. From the belt on her britches hung a slender sword, its hilt and scabbard intricately gilded. A thin, sharp scar tracing down her left cheek punctuated her brash smirk, and she flicked the door shut again behind her with a swish of her boot.  
  
The sword patted lazily against her leg as she sashayed to the bar, stepping up onto a stool in an elegant, almost dancelike flourish, resting an elbow on the bar and her chin on a loosely curled hand.  
  
“A busy evening tonight,” she said, casting her eye across the room.  
  
“Always is when there’s tell of a quest on offer,” Eryn replied with a smile, leaning on the opposite side of the bar.  
  
“Is there now…” She looked around with a grin. “Well, how’s that for good fortune.”  
  
Eryn smiled. “You hadn’t heard? So that’s not why you’ve come here, then?”  
  
“No,” the Halfling said with a shake of her head. “This was the first inn I came to on my way out of the city.” She sighed. “Apparently I’m not welcome in there any more.”  
  
Eryn narrowed her eyes a little. “And why is that?”  
  
“Oh, apparently there’s some sort of law in there against duelling, it seems like there usually is these days. Rather prudish, isn’t it?”  
  
Eryn blinked. “Isn’t that just a law against murder in general?”  
  
“Murder?” She laughed. “My dear, I have never taken a life not in defence of my own. A good duellist knows to surrender when I’ve won.”  
  
Eryn smirked back. “I take it that’s not long after you challenge them?”  
  
“Oh, I would not raise such a challenge myself,” she said, mocking defensiveness at such an allegation. “Well, not with life on the line. Certainly not my own, at any length. I simply seem to attract such offers.”  
  
“Most people manage to go their whole lives without another person ever thinking they could be improved with a few puncture wounds,” Eryn said slowly. She thought for a moment. “Or at least without anyone acting on it.”  
  
The Halfling waved this away with a smile. “That sounds a monumentally dull way to go about life.”  
  
“It seems a way to make it last longer.”  
  
“Would you rather a long existence, punctuated by occasional tastes of thrill but all but devoid of any true excitement,” she said smoothly, “Or a quick one with something to excite you every night?”  
  
“Are you still talking about duelling?”  
  
She grinned. “Are you still thinking about duelling?”  
  
Eryn smirked. “So why do you find yourself in so many duels?”  
  
The Halfling sighed. “There are people out there by the thousands who see themselves as such bastions over another person’s life that things which should be none of their concern are somehow a slight to their honour.”  
  
“How do you mean?”  
  
“Well,” she leaned in a little. “For an example, is there anyone in this room who would deem it a slight against them worth fighting me over if I were to kiss you now?”  
  
Eryn stood up a little from the bar and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I might.”  
  
“Such a shame,” the Halfling sighed. “I suspect it could have made for a wonderful evening all around.” She took out a purse, a red velvet matching her doublet and britches. “How much would a glass of red wine and a double bed cost me?”  
  
“Are you expecting someone?”  
  
“It would be presumptuous to expect,” the Halfling said, looking around the room, “But it never hurts to be prepared.” Her eyes paused for a moment. “Oh my, is that Yaffi?”  
  
Eryn followed her eyes to the bard, her shoulder leaned against the wall, in deep conversation with an enamoured local. “You’ve met before?”  
  
“Our paths crossed some way back, not long after I ran away from home,” she chuckled. “Have I missed her ventriloquist act?”  
  
“I’m afraid so,” Eryn said with a shake of her head.  
  
“Oh that’s a pity,” the Halfling sighed. “But I suppose it’s not the same once you know how she does it.”  
  
Eryn’s eyebrows raised as she poured the wine. “She told you?”  
  
“Oh, not exactly, I found out the long way around. Much more fun that way. The singer in me can’t resist a little three part harmony.” Eryn’s hand slipped and she nearly dropped the glass, spilling a little wine. The Halfling, oblivious of this, chuckled wistfully, and turned back to her. “Sorry, I got a little distracted there.”  
  
Eryn placed the glass of red wine on the bar. “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. One gold piece for the drink and the night.”  
  
The Halfling fished a gold coin out of the purse, placing it softly in Eryn’s outstretched hand and taking the glass with her other.  
  
“Sorry, I’ve spilt a little.”  
  
“Oh, that’s nothing to worry about,” the Halfling laughed. “The joy of wearing red. I used not to be so enamoured with it but the more time I spent trying to wash blood out of white, the more it grew on me.”  
  
“Surely at that point the blood isn’t the only problem with a garment?”  
  
The Halfling hesitated, mulling a mouthful of wine for a second. “How so?”  
  
“Well, isn’t the damage done to it more of a concern than the blood from the same injury?”  
  
She laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you thought the injury was mine.” She raised the glass to her lips again.  
  
“Well, you don’t always leave without injury,” Eryn said. “Unless you’re going to tell me that scar on your cheek was from falling off a tower of goblin corpses onto your own blade.”  
  
The Halfling raised her eyebrows. “That’s oddly specific.”  
  
“It’s been one of those nights,” Eryn said with a shrug and a half smile.  
  
“It’s not very often that I fight for my own wants rather than against someone else’s,” she said slowly. “But occasionally, you’ll meet a person who simply needs putting down hard in their place.” She touched a finger to her cheek. “Give them the first hit, free of charge, they feel like they’ve won one over on you. It lets them get cocky. It makes it so much more satisfying to see them broken before you by the end when they’ve fallen that little further.”  
  
“So,” Eryn said gingerly; “You said you ran away from home?”  
  
“Oh yes,” she said, a tinge of sadness weighing on her smile. “My parents and I didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, things which were quite important to them but I don’t know, they always seemed a little old-fashioned and restrictive to me.” She took a sip of wine.  
  
“Like what?”  
  
“Oh, what I should or shouldn’t wear, that I shouldn’t be ‘playing with swords’, who I should marry, why I shouldn’t leave him at the altar for his best man, that I should have stayed in the bardic college, little things that all just built up over a while.”  
“Little things like running away with your best man?”  
  
“Oh no,” she said. “No, I didn’t run away with him; the running away was a while later.”  
  
“Oh, right.”  
  
“With the bridesmaid, as it happened, but that was unrelated.” She took another sip of wine; the red lingered on her lips a while. “She went back to our home town after a while. I suppose my way of life isn’t for everyone, and she was worried about her family. Particularly her husband.”  
  
“She was married when you ran away?”  
  
“To the best man,” the Halfling said with a nod. “But best not to dwell on what is gone and to push forward with what is gained. She was never sure of travelling far from home to begin with, so once she had left for the humdrum I felt more at ease finding a place where less umbrage was raised to my apparently un-ladylike behaviour. Or, on one occasion, taken as simply a boy acting up.”  
  
“Just the one occasion?”  
  
She leaned forward onto the bar. “I was able to produce a couple of prominent pieces of evidence to the contrary.” She took another sip of wine without her eyes leaving Eryn’s and smirked as she put the empty glass down to her side.  
  
She pushed herself back from the bar and dismounted the stool elegantly, landing with her feet in the rungs that held its base together, her head just above the level of the bar.  
  
“By the way,” she said, hesitating before she disappeared from view. “Don’t take any ill meaning from the remark about the kiss.”  
  
Eryn smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s not the first time.”  
  
“That doesn’t surprise me,” the Halfling laughed. “But at the same time…” she gave the feather in her hat a flick. “You’ll know where I am if you should change your mind."


	19. Path of the Librarian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barbarians are defined by their power when in a state of rage, but that's not to say anything to what they're like when they're not raging. That thought came together with an old pun to make this character.

The door eased open, then closed quietly, a Dwarf slipping in almost incidentally between the two. A pair of round glasses perched on his nose, one lens a cobweb of cracks.  
  
For a Dwarf, he was slight, almost thin, his straggly white beard drooping to his waist and thinning into his temples, the top of his head shiny and domed.  
  
His clothes may once have been simple, plain, practical things, not well suited to being outside in this weather, but now were more patch than garment, a conglomerate of hurried repairs along tears and cuts.  
  
Head low, as though to hide in a crowd that wasn’t there (and, if it were, would almost certainly not require a Dwarf to duck not to stand out), he almost tiptoed over to the bar, curling his hands over the top of the counter, lifting his chin up whilst also trying to hide his head in his neck, and raised one ever so slightly, waving in vain for Eryn’s attention, simultaneously trying not to disturb her.  
  
“Excuse me,” he whispered, just loudly enough that only he could hear it.  
  
Eventually, Eryn turned and caught sight of his paradoxically subtle call for attention.  
  
“Evening, luv,” she said cheerily. “Pull up a stool, what can I get you?”  
  
“Oh,” he stammered, looking at the stool by his side as though he hadn’t seen it before. He clambered up awkwardly and hunched down so as not to be any more visible than he was when he was standing on the floor. “Can I have a, um, do you – sorry about this – what beers do you have on?”  
  
“We’ve got a blonde and a dark wheat running tonight,” she said, holding up two full flagons.  
  
“Right,” he said, and hesitated, looking from one plain, opaque, ceramic jug to the other as though weighing up the merits of the liquids he couldn’t see in them. “Could I please have a pint of the wheat?”  
  
“You can relax, you know,” Eryn said with gentle cheer, putting down the flagon of blonde. “This is a pub, not a library.”  
  
He dropped his gaze to the bar and sobbed.  
  
Eryn put his beer down in front of him. “I’m sorry,” she said softly; “That wasn’t meant to cause offence.”  
  
“No, not offence, it’s just…” He picked up the mug of beer and a tear rolled into it. “I was a librarian this morning.”  
  
Eryn leaned on the bar, head tilted on one side. “Oh I’m sorry, luv,” she said softly. “What happened?”  
  
He mumbled something into his beer.  
  
“Sorry dear, I can’t hear you, it can get a bit loud in here.”  
  
“I was fired,” he repeated sharply.  
  
Eryn put the flagon down on the bar next to him. “How come? If you don’t mind my asking?”  
  
“I never meant to hurt anyone,” he said tearfully. Eryn moved back a little. “They just – no-one ever listens. There are rules, and they’re rules for a reason. For example, you’d think that people who come to a building whose sole purpose is to allow people to read would have no problem understanding a sign which said, in quite large letters, ‘no talking’,” he said with a bitter chuckle, “But somehow such subtle hints that this is a quiet place are lost on some people. Or putting books back spine first so you need telepathy to know what they are – which, in turn, wouldn’t be a problem if they were back where they belonged but some people apparently can’t grasp that religion and demonology are different areas, or that ‘psionic’ starts with a P – you’d think after reading a book about psionics, it wouldn’t be a question you’d have to ask, at least not out loud. I guess after years of it, it just sort of built up and I snapped.”  
  
“What were they doing?” Eryn asked supportively. “Well, what was it that set this all off?”  
  
“And people just keep taking books out of the reference section,” he continued with a sob, apparently not hearing her, his voice slowly raising to a shout. “You don’t take books out of the reference section, that’s why they’re in the bloody reference section, where there’s a big sign, I wrote the sign, it’s a very clear sign, telling you not to withdraw books from the reference section!” He slammed the mug down on the bar and it exploded into frosted scales; shards of glass washed over the wood and cascaded down onto the floor, carried on waves of dark foam. The base of the glass sat buried in a hole in the surface, a jagged dish still holding a sliver of beer and a few needles of glass.  
  
The room fell quiet and the Sladder brothers each shifted a seat further away from him. For a moment, the only sound was the dribble of beer sliding off the bar and the tinkle of glass it carried with it.  
  
He blinked, staring at what now lay before him for a few seconds. “I’m so, so sorry,” he stammered, placing the handle of the mug down gently on a dry corner of the bar and attempting to wipe the beer out of his sodden clothes.  
  
“Don’t worry about that,” Eryn said hurriedly, grabbing a cloth and sweeping the glass and suds together and into a wooden bucket from under the bar. With a few tugs, she was able to remove the base of the glass from its new indent. “Glasses break all the time, it doesn’t serve to be precious about it.”  
  
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” the Dwarf spluttered, clasping his hands to himself out of the way.  
  
“Really, it’s fine,” Eryn reassured him, pouring another mug of beer.”  
  
“No I mean literally, I don’t know what just happened,” he stammered. “Just, I was thinking about the library and now there’s glass everywhere and I suddenly don’t have any beer any more…”  
  
“Well now you do again,” Eryn said, putting the full mug down gently next to the hole.  
  
“It’s just like what happened this morning,” he sighed. “Someone came to the desk to take a book out. Fine, I thought, that’s what we’re here for, but then I look at the book he’s carrying.”  
  
“From the reference section?” Eryn said.  
  
“Not just that!” he said, shaking. “From the chained library!”  
  
Eryn raised her eyebrows. “As in the books chained to the walls?”  
  
“Exactly! With a wooden board on the chain saying ‘do not remove’ for the kinds of people too dense to understand that if something’s chained in place then it’s not supposed to be removed!”  
  
“But how do you even try to take one out?”  
  
“He broke the chain!” he cried. “Just pulled a link open so he could take it away from the shelf, still had the plaque attached – he handed it over to me with the piece of wood saying ‘do not remove’ face up, clear as day just dumped on the cover of the book then, then he had the temerity, the absolute insolence to complain that his withdrawal was made unnecessarily complicated because the chain made it hard to remove!”  
  
“What did you say to him?”  
  
“I don’t remember.” The Dwarf took a deep swig from his drink. “The next thing I remember he was unconscious and my fellow librarians were calling for a cleric to heal him while holding me back.”  
  
“You attacked him?”  
  
“With a desk, apparently.” He took another drink. “Or a door, they didn’t tell me. I had something flat and wooden in my hands, about that size, but I was escorted off the premises before I could ask what had happened.”  
  
“Well, were any doors missing from their hinges that it could have been?”  
  
He lowered his eyes again and mumbled something.  
  
“Sorry, I can’t hear you.”  
  
“A few,” he said sheepishly. He sighed and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I don’t even know if the book was all right. Apparently I kept shouting that a library is supposed to be a quiet place.”  
  
Eryn winced. “So he was shouting at you?”  
  
“I don’t think so,” the Dwarf muttered. “Well, probably, to begin with, but apparently not for very long. Apparently for the most part I was shouting at myself to stop shouting.”  
  
“Right…”  
  
He sighed again, and took another sip of beer. “So now I’m not even allowed in the library until I’ve paid for the repairs. But I also have no job to pay for the repairs any more so I can’t just work off the debt, and I don’t know what to do.” He sniffed sadly and another tear dropped into his beer as he raised it to his lips.  
  
“Well,” Eryn said slowly, “Have you heard about the posting?”  
  
He swallowed his mouthful of beer. “Posting?”  
  
“The job posted here tonight.”  
  
“Oh,” he said sheepishly, looking up with the closest thing to a smile he’d managed all evening. “Are you looking for workers? I can do bookkeeping, stock control, that sort of thing, if you’re hiring.”  
  
“Oh I’m not, I’m afraid, but thank you for the offer,” she laughed hurriedly, then leaned in closer and whispered, “But the hooded stranger in the shadows is.” She gestured over to the parchment nailed to the pillar. “Could prove lucrative.”  
  
He shuddered. “Oh, a quest?”  
  
“If you like.”  
  
“I… I was never really the adventuring type,” he said, eyes fixed nervously on the bar. “I don’t know how I’d handle a fight.”  
  
Eryn blinked. “You knocked a man out with what may have once been a door,” she reminded him.  
  
He put the glass down in the indent left by the previous one. “I suppose it’s worth a look,” he mumbled. “Do you know where the quest is? Or I suppose where it’s going, rather?”  
  
“I don’t know precisely, but I think it’s a long way away,” she said hopefully.  
  
“Well,” he said thoughtfully; “What kind of quest is it?”  
  
Eryn’s eyes twinkled with a grin. “The kind they’ll be writing books about.”


	20. Power Mettle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a character I've always wanted to play, shaped largely by watching bands like Turisas and Tyr (interestingly, both bands named after what may be different languages' names for the same god, but that's for another time). You should probably be able to tell from it what comes next.  
>   
> One thing I should say at this point is you'll have noticed I've not managed what I set out to do, posting a character every day. Such an undertaking requires a lot of careful planning and, to be honest, I didn't really do any, and hoped to be able to come up with some more characters on the fly, but that's a harder ask than I was expecting. So there will only be two more chapters of this after all, and they won't be daily, as the last few haven't. (I honestly have no idea how long the next chapter will take).  
>   
> So, thanks for coming so far with me, I hope you've enjoyed it and maybe I'll do more of these in the future, albeit with fewer delusions of what's practically possible.

The wind roared in the chimney, lashing at the fire, snow tearing across the windows like a million soldiers of ice racing into battle.  
  
The roar exploded, violent and close, as the door swung open. Lamps too far from the protection of a corner rattled and died, a plume of smoke casting the shadow of what was once fire. The air grew dark and thickened with the oily fumes.  
  
In the doorway, with long, golden hair lashing across his face, stood a Half-Elf, clad in dark leather armour, steel bracers on his wrists, all lined with deep red stained fur. Behind the flailing hair, his face was daubed with broad strokes of deep red, the form of his features lost in the shadows’ contrast with his pearl-white skin. From his chin, his beard was plaited and held by iron beads.  
  
Across his back from each of the crossed straps of his baldrics hung a longsword, its narrow cross guard decorated with intricate knotwork echoed by its dome-shaped pommel, and visible over his left shoulder, the headstock of a musical instrument, eight keys from it echoing the sword’s pommel.  
  
The door closed behind him almost by itself and the wind fell silent, though the newcomer appeared to stand in his own private storm. His eyes glittered a pale blue in the fallen darkness, piercing the curtain of hair.  
  
With each footfall, his heavy, iron-capped boots sounded a sharp, heavy beat, a deep shock which was felt more than heard and forced weaker hearts to beat to their rhythm.  
  
As he walked from the door, the instrument slung over his back became visible; eight strings ran down it in pairs, three pairs razor thin and only just visible where they cut through the cowering firelight; the fourth pair were thick coils, almost cables. At their other end was a bowl, white varnished wood carved into the shape of a dragon’s head, black holes where its eyes would sit either side of the strings, the bridge at its snout and the shallow texture of scales picked out in intricate carving, shadows slithering at the edges as he walked.  
  
The Half-Elf put a foot up on the rung of a bar stool and leaned one elbow on his raised knee.  
  
“Good evening,” Eryn said quietly. “What can I do for you?”  
  
“Do you have mead?” His voice carried like a tidal surge, deep and clear yet harsh and forceful as a bronze bell.  
  
“I certainly do.”  
  
“Excellent,” he smiled. “A pint of that then, please.”  
  
“Um…” Eryn hesitated. “It doesn’t come in pints.”  
  
“Very well,” he said, smile broadening to a grin. “In that case an empty pint pot and enough mead to fill it.”  
  
Rikker elbowed Solker and muttered to him in Dwarven, “He drinks like a Dwarf.”  
  
He turned to the brothers. “I can talk like one too,” he replied in their own tongue, without Elven or Common accent.  
  
Eryn put a pint glass on the bar, its deep golden contents seeming to glow in the firelight that scattered through it.  
  
“About five silver,” she said with a verbal shrug.  
  
“You sound uncertain.”  
  
“It doesn’t come in pints,” she repeated. The Half-Elf smiled; behind his paint, it was warped from warm to sinister. He counted out his coins and tipped them into her hand, lifting the glass to his mouth and taking a deep draft.  
  
Rikker nodded approvingly. “You’re not just a tall Dwarf, are you?”  
  
He wiped the gold liquid from his lips with the fur which lined his bracer. “Dwarves and Elves were the first to settle my land,” he said. “I’m sorry to say not many still survive.”  
  
“Survived what?”  
  
He set down his glass, curling up a hand in front of his face, eyes fixed on the empty space between his fingers.  
  
“Centuries ago, the walls between this plane and the next wore thin over our land, and forces from the Shadowfell tore them down. The sun was swallowed in darkness as the land was trapped, neither in one world nor the other.”  
  
As he said this, the wind growled in the chimney; the fire cowered in its hearth and the remaining lamps quivered, as though his words sucked the light from the room.  
  
“The only light cast was as the trees and fields burned until the stone itself was scorched and cracked where they had stood. Dwarves, Elves and Humans fought with the bravery of thousands of their numbers, not for victory, but for survival.  
  
“Few survived the cataclysm; the Dwarves and Humans never recovered in number, but my Elven ancestors survived through the length of their youth, and my Human ancestors’ blood lives on in their line.”  
  
He picked up the glass again and took another drink. “The Dwarves were the first of us, and though they do not live on in the flesh, their language and their ways live on in the Half-Elves who live there now.”  
  
The wind died down and let the light return.  
  
“But ours is the way of the old Dwarves,” he continued. “Dwarves who raised Elves with their long memories, to carry those memories down generations of Dwarves and Humans unchanged. Dwarves from an age where it was steel and not gold which put food on the table.”  
  
Rikker raised his glass to the Half-Elf. “And you’re a proper old Dwarven warrior like they don’t make any more, then?”  
  
The Half-Elf laughed, and reached over his shoulder, grasping the fingerboard of the instrument slung down his back and swinging it in-front of him.  
  
“I am a skald,” he said. “A craftsman of songs and poems of the tales of those who went before me. A skald’s creed is simple: we sing the praises of every deed beyond us.  
  
“There are two ways one can go about this to keep the skald’s honour: either the skald must sing of all they see, or they must seek to become that which their descendants will sing of. Those who choose the first will embolden the bravery and quell the hubris in those who choose the second.”  
  
Eryn leaned over the bar. “So which have you chosen?”  
  
“Almost all skalds begin as the former,” he said. “We are raised on the songs of heroes who have gone before us, and we bring those stories to the world, until we can stand idly by no longer, and our own road takes the second path. But I was born with my first steps on that road.”  
  
“How come?”  
  
He stood with the instrument hanging prominently before him, and lifted the fingerboard vertical in front of his shoulder so that the dragon’s face looked out.  
  
“I was born the son of the slayer of the White Wyrm, the warrior who destroyed the beast which terrorised the island and changed our land forever.”  
  
“Is that made from the actual dragon’s skull?” Eryn asked, pointing at the bowl of the instrument.  
  
“Its skull hangs over the door of the house where I was born,” he said with pride. “Bones from its wings fashioned these frets, a disc from its spine was carved into this headstock. And the sword which slew it…” He drew the sword from over his other shoulder. “I swore would not hang idle over a mantle while I had a good hand with which to wield it.”  
  
“Truly your father’s son, then,” Solker said approvingly.  
  
“My father?” The skald laughed. “I do not know of my father. I am Thorald Snorrnemi, student of Snorr; before I was his student, I was Thorald Ingessen, son of Inge. A mother is present at the birth of her child by the nature of birth itself, but a child is raised by all who can. The name of a child’s father is a personal matter known only to the mother if at all, and no man before my apprenticeship to Snorr had any greater influence on my life than any other. No child I have fathered views me as guardian, though I may give my name to one whom I raise as a skald.”  
  
“So the dragon slayer is your mother?”  
  
He raised a fist to the air. “My mother is Inge Norcorlar. A student to no master and grown out of her mother’s name, while I still carry Snorr’s name, she has won her own. And it is the song of her deeds which brought me to the life of the Skald, and the sword from her hand which brought me to seek out great deeds and those who would brave them, to fight by their sides and earn my place in the songs yet unsung.”  
  
He stepped first onto a bench, from it to a table, his instrument hanging across his hips, feet spread apart like a warrior braced against an incoming strike, his fist still raised above his head.  
  
“It is this song which moulded me, tempered me like a blacksmith’s blade.”  
  
He brought his fist down through the line of strings and their roar shook the windows and the glasses and bottles behind the bar. With each stamp of his boots the table shook, the ground pulsed, a shockwave punched the air.  
  
The fire shocked into life, silhouetting him against its blaze, and he threw back his head to the sky, letting out a blood-curdling scream, the howl of a wolf entwined with the roar of a tiger and the cry of a hawk.  
  
This was no song of love, nor a welcome of merriment. This was a song of steel.


	21. The Slayer's Saga

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thorald's mother (I think a Monster Slayer Ranger) is one of my favourite character backstories, which I've told several people about before but never in verse. Over the last week, I've learned why.  
>   
> It was in part inspired by honeymooning in Iceland, and learning that there was a law against women bearing weapons at one point, which goes a little against the typical Viking image of shield-maidens. But history is full of women who give no craps about this kind of nonsense and were badasses regardless, and the present is better for it. Remember that while the setting you're in may be egalitarian and equal, no society always was, and long lives like Elves' will come with memories of these times.  
>   
> The rhyme and rhythm is also based on a cross between power metal and Icelandic and Faroese folk music, and may need setting to music to make sense because of the latter. When I find a way to upload that, I'll upload Yaffi and Ann's song too, which I set to music while writing it because isn't procrastination great?

Where white waves break on blackened sand  
Mountains of ice ascend, and  
Flames of green and blue ignite  
Over the stars by cold night  
Fire and water, ice and land

A shadow falls on the people below  
Of white wings and of scattered screeching crows  
Driven before it with fear in their cries  
The ravens’ warning as they looked back down,  
“Make haste, flee, for you will not save your town!  
There is no shelter at sea nor the skies

White as driven snow its skin  
Cold is the air it flies in  
Ice its roar and tooth and claw,  
None will it spare to stay, nor  
Live to tell their tale again

 _But these were men of Drekfaley,_  
_And rose with steel in hand,_  
_For they were not afraid to die_  
_In battle for their land_  
_With sword and shield we stand our ground_  
_Through fire and ice and war_  
_With roar of might the horns will sound_  
_For Drekfaley once more!_

It made its land a mile or so  
North in the mountain’s shadow  
Where the warning ravens’ cry  
Warriors stood to defy  
Drekfaley no fear would know

The city walls where it came to the ground  
Were scattered into pieces all around  
Broken beneath the white claws of the beast  
The first that rose was a fighter of pride  
And he swore he would have the dragon’s hide  
“By my own axe, on its flesh we shall feast!”

Strong he struck but ne’er it bled  
Blow after blow deflected  
With one swing it struck him down  
His was no hide of dragon  
By his blood, the man fell dead.

 _But these were men of Drekfaley,_  
_And rose with steel in hand,_  
_For they were not afraid to die_  
_In battle for their land_  
_With sword and shield we stand our ground_  
_Through fire and ice and war_  
_With roar of might the horns will sound_  
_For Drekfaley once more!_

Even as the fighter fell  
Hand on the axe’s handle  
Harsh as ice the dragon’s breath  
Carried a wave of cold death  
Laughter as its killing spell

Entombed in ice by the behemoth’s breath  
The people of the city froze in death  
Statues of courage in facing the maw  
Its roar was heard in the town it had passed  
An archer there, his bow and arrow clasped  
Swearing by night he would bring back its claws

Unaware he caught the thing  
First, with an arrow piercing  
Now caught in the dragon’s eyes  
No more he struck with surprise  
Broken by the monster’s wing

 _But these were men of Drekfaley,_  
_And rose with steel in hand,_  
_For they were not afraid to die_  
_In battle for their land_  
_With sword and shield we stand our ground_  
_Through fire and ice and war_  
_With roar of might the horns will sound_  
_For Drekfaley once more!_

Might and cunning, both had failed  
Bravery neither prevailed  
“If by magic it would reign,  
By the same it will be slain  
I’ll return here with its tail”

With fire and thunder the mage did attack  
With blizzard did the dragon strike him back  
Mage lights reflected all over the sky  
But by the morning the fire was no more  
The dragon with its mocking laughter roared  
“Send me your best, with these fools may they die!”

Taking up a sword in hand  
Inge the blacksmith stood, and  
Rose to fight and so avenge  
Those who had failed its challenge  
At its feet, she took her stand.

 _For I am born of Drekfaley_  
_And I come with steel in hand_  
_For I am not afraid to die_  
_In battle for my land_  
_With sword in hand she stood her ground_  
_Before the dragon’s roar_  
_For me, she cried, the horns will sound_  
_O’er Drekfaley once more!_

“Hundreds of your kin lie dead  
Warriors I have bested  
Now you send a smith to die?”  
“I send myself, and by my  
Blade I bear I’ll take your head”

The dragon laughed and its roar was of rime  
But Inge dodged and to its back she climbed  
From the beast’s back, black blood she has spilled  
“Your claws will save you no more from my blade,  
The power of your breath is, too, allayed  
Now you will pay for the ones you have killed”

Piercing through the dragon’s skin  
Blood on the snow was spilling  
Down its neck then Inge ran  
Blade held before her charge, and  
Took its head, to show her kin.

 _For I am born of Drekfaley_  
_And I come with steel in hand_  
_For I am not afraid to die_  
_In battle for my land_  
_With sword in hand she stood her ground_  
_Before the dragon’s roar_  
_For me, she cried, the horns will sound_  
_O’er Drekfaley once more!_

Now she came back with its head  
Over her own head lifted  
Trophy of the deed now done  
High on the snow-clad mountain  
Proof the dragon now was dead

But Drekfaley held an archaic law  
That women only fought in times of war  
Wielding her sword in itself was a crime  
But Drekfaley by that sword she had saved  
For Inge then, the men a pardon gave  
Sparing of action against her this time

Inge would not bear this slight  
Why must a warrior’s birthright  
Be the sole reserve of men?  
So for the very same, in  
Trial by combat I will fight.

 _For I am born of Drekfaley_  
_And I come with steel in hand_  
_For I am not afraid to die_  
_To win the right to stand_  
_With sword in hand she stood her ground_  
_In challenge to the law_  
_For me, she cried, the horns will sound_  
_O’er Drekfaley once more!_

The law would not allow her that,  
Challenge to trial by combat  
Fell within the ancient law  
Inge replied, “Then first, for  
This right too I’ll fight!” she’s spat

One man to challenge her picked up his sword  
“Defeat me and this will be your reward  
I am no dragon, but neither are you”  
The red sun broke through with the morning’s first light  
Before all of the town they met to fight  
Drawing their swords to decide on her due

Blow for blow she matched his style  
Strike after strike she struck, while  
All the men around them stood  
Broken, her foe surrendered  
“Now, I claim my right to trial!”

 _But not a man in Drakfaley_  
_With sword or shield in hand_  
_Could win the fight to her deny_  
_The rights of all the land_  
_With sword in hand, she held the ground_  
_In challenge to the law_  
_And all around did voices sound_  
_For Inge ever more!_

 _For all those born of Drekfaley,_  
_Now rise with steel in hand,_  
_For we are not afraid to die_  
_In battle for their land_  
_With sword and shield we stand our ground_  
_Through fire and ice and war_  
_With roar of might the horns will sound_  
_For Drekfaley once more!_


	22. A New Chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's come to an end, and only a week late and eight chapters short. Thanks for reading this so far, and I hope you've enjoyed it. Feel free to use any of these characters yourself, and let me know how that goes if you do.  
>   
> It's a lot later than I'd hoped to post this but the last chapter took a lot out of my ability to write for a while. We're back to an NPC here, who first came in back at the start of this evening and has been sitting in a dark corner ever since. So I'll end this story with the beginnings of another.

As the echoes of Thorald’s song rang from the stone walls, the life flickered back into the lamps and the fire subsided. Shouts and cheers were raised for a person they had never known in a land they had never seen.  
  
As the hubbub died down, Eryn reached up to a brass bell, still ringing from the bard’s voice, and rang the chimes for last orders.  
  
The locals took what place they could at the bar and the visiting adventurers, as one, turned to the dark corner of the room, where the shadow beckoned them.  
  
As they crowded around the stranger in the corner, lining the table which stretched from them, the shadow seemed to grow to accommodate them, until all were part of the same mysterious gloom, with the stranger at its head.  
  
The stranger spoke in a quiet voice, swallowed in the murk but drunk in by the adventurers, keen ears sharpened to the tale being woven.  
  
The stranger produced a map, spreading it across the table, mountain peaks picked out in white, untold beasts rearing from the sea and circling the skies.  
  
They produced a purse, emptying its contents over the map, not a payment but a taste; mountains now refracted through diamonds, leviathans rose up through waves of sapphire, dragons were magnified in rubies. Facets shone in the sparse light, shafts of colour twinkling over eager faces.  
  
Among the shining stones hung unknown runes, writing in scripts undeciphered, tongues unspoken, words alien to eyes and ears alike, secrets broken with pieces missing.  
  
Then they produced stories, tales of those who lived beneath a great evil, lives in constant anguish and peril; tales of those behind it, the powers lorded over them, the terrors who came in the night.  
  
The strong squared up, none to be seen as the weaker; the wise poker-faced, none to be seen as without understanding nor without intrigue; fresh faces shared eager glances, this brave new world laid out before them. Wanderlust itched at their feet, jewels and precious metals wet their lips, curiosity whispered in their ears, purpose tugged at their heart strings as each found a journey tailored to fit their dreams.  
  
As the locals drifted off to their beds so too the adventurers left the table, stepping into the light in clusters, new friends sharing their plans, their hopes, a sparkle of excitement in each eye stolen from the glittering riches on the table.  
  
One by one the groups turned in for the night, wending their ways to bed, until only Eryn was left with the stranger in the shadows, pouring the gems and coins back into the purse from which they came.  
  
Eryn came to the stranger’s table collecting glasses left by the adventurers, and the stranger threw back the hood of their cape and looked around the room.  
  
“I like what you’ve done with the place.”  
  
Eryn dropped a glass. “Granddad?!”  
  
He grinned. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”  
  
“What in the hells are you doing here?”  
  
“Keeping the family business going,” he smiled. “And helping the world along a little at a time. The things we learn running a place like this, we’re more wasted behind that bar than the Sladders are on it.”  
  
Eryn pulled up a chair. “I thought you’d retired to somewhere quiet in the countryside or something.”  
  
“No, no, we don’t retire, we take the work with us,” he chuckled. “Thought I’d settle down somewhere but it was never going to happen; ended up going off on a trip with a band of adventurers who met in the next town over, wasn’t much in a fight but you pick up a lot of wiles in a place like this – you know how to read someone well enough you learn how to write them too.  
  
“Anyway, I was probably too old to be doing that when I started,” he said with a sigh. “I’m not an Elf, after all. But it got me around.”  
  
“So you’re putting new hands to your unfinished work?”  
  
“Oh, no, this wasn’t my work,” he said, gesturing dismissively over the map. “We were a bunch of small-time wanderers, didn’t have it in us to go for the big picture. But it’s my work now. Keep an ear to the ground, see what comes about and sell it to someone who really can do it.”  
  
Eryn looked over the map. It was a delicately crafted masterwork, fine pen strokes lining the coasts with breaking waves and cracking down mountain slopes.  
  
“So you think these who were in tonight are up to it where you weren’t?”  
  
“Not yet,” he said, rolling up the map; “But they will be. They have it in them, like we didn’t. The hard work’s going to be getting it out of them.”  
  
“And how’re you doing that?”  
  
“Keep an eye on them, mostly,” he said. “A gentle nudge this way or that along the way, do my best to keep them away from anything that could actually kill them, the hard bit’s working the other side.”  
  
Eryn raised an eyebrow. “Who’s the other side?”  
  
He shrugged. “Could be anyone really. Bit of a breadcrumb trail here and there, lead the odd goblin band away from civilians and into their path and they’ll be cleaning up the road as they go along.”  
  
“This is a game of chess to you?”  
  
“No, not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “Chess you only play with one side, and there’s a player who wants the other to win. If I’m playing against anyone, I don’t know it, so they’re a better player than I am.” He smiled slightly. “But I doubt it, as I seem to be winning so far.”  
  
“But winning what? How do you make a living out of this?”  
  
“I don’t lie about the work being profitable, I make sure of that,” he said slowly. “Generally profitable enough that they can’t carry everything. I follow them quite closely as it is, so once they’ve been down some gods-forsaken crypt and purged it of some form of infestation or what have you it’s quite safe to go down and pick up what’s left over. I keep enough to get by, a few baubles like these to catch the eyes of another tavern full of hopefuls, and leave the rest for the locals. Generally repair works need doing, more often than not ground needs sanctifying, stop whatever was there coming back where that can help.” He sighed. “Took more when I was an adventurer but there’s not much to do with that kind of money any more. You should take to adventuring yourself while you’re still young.”  
  
Eryn laughed. “I don’t see myself swinging a sword much.”  
  
“Nor did I,” he said. “You’ve got a way with people, though, skill with words, a good head on your shoulders, all the same I had. Lot of people in the adventuring line of work don’t have that. You’d think wizards would be good with their brains but for all that learning there’s not a lot of room left for common sense.”  
  
“Even if,” she said, shaking her head, “This side of things needs holding up. There’s always got to be an Unarmed Man where people like them can meet… well, people like you.”  
  
“And there always will be as there always has,” he agreed. “But it can’t always be you.”  
  
“Well there isn’t really anyone to hand it over to,” Eryn said with a wry smile. “The closest thing I have to an employee is usually a cat. And for all I know she may be leaving tomorrow on this jaunt you’ve got planned.”  
  
“That’s what kids are for.”  
  
“Well, the only proposition I’ve had lately was from the Halfling with the feathery cap.”  
  
He shrugged and sighed. “Well, she won’t give you a little bartender.”  
  
“A very little one,” Eryn smiled.  
  
“But you don’t need a step-stool to reach everything.”  
  
Eryn stared wide-eyed at him. “I’m just going to try very hard to pretend you didn’t say that.”  
  
He raised an eyebrow in confusion. “Well there’s a lot that can be done behind the bar that you don’t have to see over it for.”  
  
“Granddad!”  
  
“What? Changing barrels, putting glasses away, unless you’ve rearranged a lot since I was working here it should all be Halfling-accessible.”  
  
“Oh. Right.”  
  
“Why, what did –”  
  
“Somehow I don’t see her as the kind to stick around and do bar work,” Eryn said quickly.  
  
“Shame,” he said, and shrugged. “Best make the most of tonight, then.”  
  
“Granddad!”  
  
“I’m just teasing you,” he chuckled. “But seriously, you’d make a good adventurer. It’d do you some good to see the bar from the other side, it’s an edge most out there don’t have.” He stood up, pulling his hood back up, and walked to her chair. “There’s a world out there, and you should see it without having to hear a bard sing about it.” He patted her softly on the shoulder and set off for the stairs.  
  
As his footsteps died away, Eryn was left with the sound of the fire crackling away at its last embers of wood, the wind sleepily howling at the windows and a familiar scratching at the door.  
  
She stood and pulled open the door, and Jen walked in, shook the snow from her back, and padded off to curl up by the remains of the fire.  
  
Eryn stood at the door a while. She looked out into the darkness, her mind’s eye painting those intricate mountains and the soaring dragons onto the black canvas. There was a world out there, that’s true. Whole stories left untold.  
  
She closed the door and turned the key. Someone had to be there to give the stories a place to start.


End file.
